Novels this thrilling don’t come along very often. Tokarczuk’s novel succeeds as both a suspenseful murder mystery and a powerful and profound meditation on human existence and how a life fits into the world around it. As the body count rises, readers are treated to Janina’s beliefs (“Finally, transformed into tiny quivering photons, each of our deeds will set off into Outer Space, where the planets will keep watching it like a film until the end of the world”), descriptions (a body is “a troublesome piece of luggage”), and observations (flowers in a garden “are neat and tidy, standing straight and slender, as if they’d been to the gym”). Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: A Novel Kindle Edition by Olga Tokarczuk (Author), Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Translator) Format: Kindle Edition 9,862 ratings Editors' pick Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense See all formats and editions Kindle 13.99 Read with Our Free App Audiobook 0. Soon another body turns up, and Janina, an avid creator of horoscopes and, more generally, prone to theorizing and ascribing incidents to larger systems, develops a theory that animals are killing the locals. Before the police arrive, Janina and Oddball find a deer bone in Big Foot’s mouth. Narrator Janina Duszejko, an English teacher and winter caretaker for a few summer houses in an isolated Polish hamlet near the Czech border, is awakened one night by her neighbor, whom she calls Oddball, who informs her that their neighbor, nicknamed Big Foot, is dead in his house. The first is that the book, first published in Polish in 2009 and newly translated by Antonia Lloyd. Whom do we deem sane? it asks.Tokarczuk follows her Man Booker International winner Flights with an astounding mystical detective novel. Two things stand out about Olga Tokarczuk's novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Who is worthy of a voice?Ī 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. Ī 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. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. 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.

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

'A brilliant literary murder mystery.' - Chicago Tribune