Olga Tokarczuk is the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the International Booker Prize, among many other honours. 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.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.

An extraordinary novel from Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk, the renowned Polish author of Flights and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

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“It’s an extraordinary feeling–to imagine that somewhere deep inside, you are someone completely different from the person you always thought you were. But it didn’t make me feel anxious, just relieved, finally free of a kind of weariness that used to permeate my life.

After a while this powerful feeling faded entirely, blotted out by concrete images: the door open to the hall, the dogs sleeping, the workmen who arrived at dawn and are putting up a stone wall.”

-- p.72

I cannot summarise this novel but I'd suggest you live your life alongside it and let it linger and seep its way into the drum of your daily rhythms. You'll begin to notice how it sits with you, its presence a subtle reminder like an ear marked page. Marta will be there in the shadows, infrequently visiting as she does, her words if not true to you, something to chew on. I read it once cover to cover but each page many times over as I digested the story of a remote Polish village that held the expansive fragmented worlds of its few inhabitants. Stories, myths, gossip, anecdotes, philosophical reveries and even recipes populate this meandering tale, as narrative threads pull together a story of home, a house; one that is very much alive. 

Originally published under in Wałbrzych, Poland under the title Dom dzienny, dom nocny by Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1998, the House of Day, House of Night is an immersive constellation novel by Olga Tokarczuk and translated by Antonia Lloyed-Jones. An ode to the real and legendary histories of Lower Silesia, Southern Poland, its anthology of stories, poems, prose and other short writing recover forgotten chapters of Eastern and Central Europe’s multilingual and multicultural history. The novel is set in derelict Nowa Ruda, close to the Czech border in a formerly German region that has, over the centuries, frequently changed national ownership, and forms part of Europe’s sanatorium belt. Tokarczuk explores identity, transformation, and the meaning of home as a physical and metaphorical space through  landscapes and dreamscapes filled with the ghosts of past and present inhabitants. Crossing borders and blurring binaries suffuse the history of the landscape owned, lost and remade by a succession of lives.  

In singular perspective, loosely following an anonymous narrator with her partner, R., a mosaic of relationships emerge within the town as the reader is adrift amongst tales of their lives, memories, dreams, and small-town folklore. As readers we begin in a dream, and are introduced to a fixture of the village, the elderly neighbour Marta. Her movements like that of the wind, constant yet enigmatic, her prose broken and filled with knowledge deeply embedded in the collective consciousness. As the novel progresses we share moments with the eccentrics and ‘misfits’; Marek Marek, a gender dysphoric Monk, the tale of Saint Kummernis, a lover found between a dream and a phonebook, villagers bound to the stars and the ordinary figures that exemplify the extraordinary feeling that the separation between dream and lived reality is divided only by belief.