Winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize
Olga Tokarczuk is the author of nine novels, three short story collections and has been translated into thirty languages. Her novel Flights won the 2018 International Booker Prize, in Jennifer Croft’s translation. In 2019, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
‘A magnificent writer.’
— Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize in Literature laureate
2015
‘A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.’
— Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News
‘One among a very few signal European novelists of the past
quarter-century.’
— The Economist
‘Flights works like a dream does: with fragmentary trails that
add up to a delightful reimagining of the novel itself.’
— Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven
Killings
‘The best novel I’ve read in years is Olga
Tokarczuk’s Flights (trans. Jennifer Croft): Most great
writers build a novel as one would a beautiful house, brick by
brick, wall by wall, from the ground up. Or using another metaphor,
a writer gathers her yarn, and with good needles and structure,
knits a wonderful sweater or scarf. I tend to prefer novels where a
writer weaves her threads this way and that, above and below,
inside outside, and ends up with a carpet. Flights is
such a novel.’
— Rabih Alameddine, author of An Unnecessary Woman
‘Flights could almost be an inventory of the ways narrative
can serve a writer short of, and beyond, telling a story. The
book’s prose is a lucid medium in which narrative crystals grow to
an ideal size, independent structures not disturbing the balance of
the whole … Much of the pleasure of reading Flights comes
from the essay clusters embedded between sections of narratives ...
The cascades of concise interstitial passages are often satisfying
riffs on time and space, bodies and language, repetition and
uniqueness … Jennifer Croft’s translation is exceptionally
adventurous … she can give the impression, not of passing on
meanings long after the event, but of being present at the moment
when language reached out to thought.’
— Adam Mars-Jones, London Review of Books
‘Olga Tokarczuk is a household name in Poland and one of Europe’s
major humanist writers, working here in the continental tradition
of the “thinking” or essayistic novel. Flights has echoes
of WG Sebald, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugreši?, but
Tokarczuk inhabits a rebellious, playful register very much her
own.... Flights is a passionate and enchantingly
discursive plea for meaningful connectedness, for the acceptance of
“fluidity, mobility, illusoriness”. After all, Tokarczuk reminds
us, “Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or
conduct raids.” Hotels on the continent would do well to have a
copy of Flights on the bedside table. I can think of no
better travel companion in these turbulent, fanatical times.’
— Kapka Kassabova, Guardian
‘It’s a busy, beautiful vexation, this novel, a quiver full of
fables of pilgrims and pilgrimages, and the reasons — the hidden,
the brave, the foolhardy — we venture forth into the
world.... The book is transhistorical, transnational; it leaps
back and forth through time, across fiction and fact. Interspersed
with the narrator’s journey is a constellation of discrete stories
that share rhyming motifs and certain turns of phrase.... In
Jennifer Croft’s assured translation, each self-enclosed account is
tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language balletic,
unforced.’
— Parul Sehgal, New York Times
‘Tokarczuk is one of Europe’s most daring and original writers, and
this astonishing performance is her glittering, bravura entry in
the literature of ideas.... A select few novels possess the wonder
of music, and this is one of them. No two readers will experience
it exactly the same way. Flights is an international,
mercurial, and always generous book, to be endlessly revisited.
Like a glorious, charmingly impertinent travel companion, it
reflects, challenges, and rewards.’
— Eileen Battersby, Los Angeles Review of Books
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