A magnificent writer.
Svetlana Alexievich, 2015 Nobel Prizein Literature laureate
A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.
Annie Proulx, author ofThe 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
One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.
The Economist
[A] visionary novel ... Tokarczuk is wrestling with the biggest philosophical themes: the purpose of life on earth, the nature of religion, the possibility of redemption, the fraught and terrible history of eastern European Jewry. With its formidable insistence on rendering an alien world with as much detail as possible, the novel reminded me at times ofParadise Lost. The vividness with which its done is amazing. At a micro-level, she sees things with a poetic freshness....The Books of Jacob, which is so demanding and yet has so much to say about the issues that rack our times, will be a landmark in the life of any reader with the appetite to tackle it.
Marcel Theroux,Guardian(praise forThe Books of Jacob)
The Books of Jacobis a spellbinding epic, one of the great literary achievements of the decade: a poetically brimful recreation of the world of a Jewish false messiah in 18th-century Poland, but beyond as well to mystically drawn priests and errant aristocrats. Charged with a sensuous immediacy its the kind of hypnotic novel you not so much read as dwell in, and which then, magically, comes to dwell in you.
Simon Schama, Financial Times(praise forThe Books of Jacob)
Drive Your Plowis exhilarating in a way that feels fierce and private, almost inarticulable; its one of the most existentially refreshing novels Ive read in a long time.
Jia Tolentino,The New Yorker(praise forDrive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)
Tokarczuks novels, poems and short stories consistently open up unpredictable wonders and astonishments, and there isnt a genre that she cant subvert. ...Antonia Lloyd-Jones pulls off a flawless, intimate translation, even tackling the technically dazzling feat of presenting Blakes poems as translations from English into Polish, back into English. ... [Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead] will make you want to read everything that Tokarczuk has written.
Financial Times(praise forDrive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)
Flightsworks like a dream does: with fragmentary trails that add up to a delightful reimagining of the novel itself.
Marlon James, author ofA Brief History of Seven Killings(praise forFlights)
Its a busy, beautiful vexation, this novel, a quiver full of fables of pilgrims and pilgrimages, and the reasonsthe hidden, the brave, the foolhardywe venture forth into the world.... The book is transhistorical, transnational; it leaps back and forth through time, across fiction and fact. Interspersed with the narrators journey is a constellation of discrete stories that share rhyming motifs and certain turns of phrase.... In Jennifer Crofts assured translation, each self-enclosed account is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language balletic, unforced.
Parul Sehgal,New York Times(praise forFlights)
