House of Day, House of Night - by Olga Tokarczuk (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Nowa Ruda is a small town in Silesia, an area that has been a part of Poland, Germany, and the former Czechoslovakia in the past. When the narrator moves into the area, she ... discovers everyone--and everything--has its own story. With the help of Marta, her enigmatic neighbor, the narrator accumulates these stories, tracing the history of Nowa Ruda from the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, from the caller who wins the radio quiz every day to the tale of the man who causes international tension when he dies on the border, one leg on the Polish side, the other on the Czech side. Each of the stories represents a brick and they interlock to reveal the immense monument that is the town. What emerges is the message that the history of any place--no matter how humble--is limitless, that by describing or digging at the roots of a life, a house, or a neighborhood, one can see all the connections, not only with one's self and one's dreams but also with all of the universe"--

Book Synopsis

"Bewitching ... Tokarczuk is an excellent storyteller." --The New York Times

A novel about the rich stories of small places, from the Nobel Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Books of Jacob and Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

A woman settles in a remote Polish village where she knows no one. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of the living and the 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 Tokarczuk's International Booker Prize-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night reminds us that the story of any place, no matter how humble, is boundless.

Review Quotes

Praise for House of Day, House of Night

"Bewitching ... Junctures and borderlands are rich sources of material for Tokarczuk -- the gray areas of gender, the separation of mind and body, the line between the human and the natural worlds... [She] is an excellent storyteller." --The New York Times Book Review

"A new edition of an early Olga Tokarczuk novel is cause for celebration... For those many fans who have only read Tokarczuk's recent work, this earlier novel should not be missed." --The Boston Globe

"Evoke[s] a world in which light and darkness are always intermingling, and where modernity cannot be disentangled from folk belief. . . The kaleidoscope of tales and vignettes, and the blurring of the banal with the macabre, produces a dusky, dreamlike atmosphere that envelopes one's thoughts like a fine mist."--Wall Street Journal

"This is a constellation novel: a mosaic of stories, myths, gossip, anecdotes, philosophical reveries and even recipes. Together, these fragments form a history of the region. . . . .Alongside history and memory, Tokarczuk explores identity, transformation, and the meaning of home. Her meditations range from the banal to the surreal: playful riffs on mushrooms are interwoven with weighty existential questions. . .Lloyd-Jones's translation eloquently captures these various registers." --The Financial Times

"Strange and delightful. . . Few writers are able to create a constellation of myths, rumors, and humanity like Tokarczuk. House of Day, House of Night is more than a welcome addition to her impressive oeuvre." --The Chicago Review of Books

"In a landscape of darkness, dreams, and drink, this novel is more than the sum of its eerie parts." --Vulture

"A poetic, rich work of art that ebbs and flows like a stream. . . Moments of absurdity. . .mix in with moments of rich emotion, all topped with a swirl of folklore-like magic. A treat for fans of Tokarczuk and literary fiction."--Booklist, STARRED

"As a whole, the book is at once simpler and, at the same time, infinitely more complex than it at first appears. An exquisitely constructed, mercurial gem from the Nobel prizewinner." --Kirkus, STARRED

"Vivid... What emerges from this cornucopia of curiosities is a rich and pulsating view into life itself, which the narrator views as 'beautiful despite the terrible things other people say about it.' It's a marvel." --Publishers Weekly, STARRED

About the Author

Olga Tokarczuk has won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the International Booker Prize, among many other honors. She is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, two collections of essays, and a children's book; her work has been translated into more than fifty languages.