House of Day, House of Night
Olga Tokarczuk
We send all orders via Royal Mail: within the UK, choose from 1st Class, 2nd Class or Special Delivery; for the rest of the world, International Standard or International Tracked. Delivery and packaging charges are calculated automatically at the checkout.
To collect orders in person from the Bookshop, choose Click and Collect at the checkout.
From the publisher
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death – with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech – was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology. Another brilliant ‘constellation novel’ in the mode of her International Booker Prize-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night is a brilliantly imaginative epic novel of a small place by Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most daring and ambitious novelists of our time.
‘House of Day, House of Night is full of death, destruction and dreams. Written in 1998, and now translated into English, it is what Tokarczuk calls a “constellation” novel. It is made up of bits of memoir, dream diary, metaphysical musings and sketches of life in Tokarczuk’s adopted home of rural Krajanow, southwest Poland…. House of Day, House of Night is packed with chewy philosophical ideas and spellbinding images.’
— Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times
‘Alongside history and memory, Tokarczuk explores identity, transformation, and the meaning of home…. Tokarczuk’s reflections are saturated with sensory language that conveys a vivid sense of the landscape and seasonal change – floods, meadow fires and gales. She also displays unnerving prescience in recognising the latent force of technology and AI: the narrator imagines her partner’s sky photographs being uploaded into a computer to create one single image: “which is sure to mean something . . . And then we’ll know.”’
— Lucy Popescu, Financial Times
‘A magnificent writer.’
— Svetlana Alexievich, 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate
‘A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.’
— Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News
‘Olga Tokarczuk is inspired by maps and a perspective from above, which tends to make her microcosmos a mirror of macrocosmos. She constructs her novels in a tension between cultural opposites: nature versus culture, reason versus madness, male versus female, home versus alienation.’
— Nobel Committee for Literature