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Prowad? swój p?ug przez ko?ci umar?ych

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

A Novel

In 2009, Polish writer and Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, stayed at NIAS as a writer-in-residence. She worked on her novel "Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych", which was later translated as "Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: A Novel."

About the Book

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . .

A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?

More information about the Polish edition can be found here.

Reviews

“A brilliant literary murder mystery.” —Chicago Tribune

“Extraordinary. Tokarczuk’s novel is funny, vivid, dangerous, and disturbing, and it raises some fierce questions about human behavior. My sincere admiration for her brilliant work.” —Annie Proulx

The entire cosmic catastrophy” (review in The Guardian)

The Author

Olga Tokarczuk is one of Poland’s most celebrated and beloved authors, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Booker International Prize, as well as her country’s highest literary honor, the Nike. She is the author of eight novels and two short story collections, and has been translated into more than thirty languages.