drive your plough over the bones of the dead

Outside the dead man’s cottage they find two deer standing “as if we had caught them in the middle of performing a ritual whose meaning we couldn’t fathom”. It is to announce Big Foot’s death that Oddball makes an unaccustomed visit to Mrs Duszejko one winter’s night.

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While Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead adopts a more conventional narrative structure, it too is a “constellation” novel – the sequence of its events and the destinies of its characters mapped by the movements of the stars. Tokarczuk has described her fictions, which combine stories with non-fiction, essayistic meditations, maps and diagrams, as “constellation” novels. To English-speaking readers she is perhaps best known for her sixth novel, Flights, which was awarded the 2018 International Man Booker Prize.

In her native Poland, Tokarczuk is a controversial celebrity: the recipient of numerous literary awards and, after the publication of her prizewinning 2014 novel, The Books of Jacob, the subject of violent criticism, accusations of treason and death threats by Polish nationalists. Aspects of dark fantasy permeate Olga Tokarczuk’s grimly comic tale of death and vengeance, set in a remote forested plateau on the border between two realms, with a cast of intelligent animals, ghostly apparitions, celestial influence and humans who resemble trolls, witches, giants and goblins. If this sounds like the beginning of a Grimm fairy tale, the resemblance is apt. In a house on the edge of a forest, there lived an old woman.

Drive your plough over the bones of the dead