House of Day, House of Night, Olga Tokarczuk
House of Day, House of Night, Olga Tokarczuk
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House of Day, House of Night

Author: Olga Tokarczuk, Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Narrator: Priyanga Burford

Unabridged: 11 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 12/02/2025


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.

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Robert on September 12, 2014

One of the best works of fiction I’ve ever read. This is one of those undefinable, indescribable wonders that make most fiction look so ordinary. Most of all it a novel of place, but not in the usual sense. It’s a novel of exile, but the reasons for its characters’ exile are myriad (and the narrator......more

Goodreads review by Fátima on November 08, 2021

O que me ocorre escrever sobre este livro, e uma forma de tentar, ênfase no tentar, explicá-lo, é fazer uma comparação mal amanhada com uma exposição de pintura. Este livro é um museu e tem diversos quadros nas suas salas, uns quadros em telas maiores, leia-se histórias mais extensas, e uns quadros......more

Goodreads review by Janet on September 17, 2025

Oh boy--you know how you dig into a book, not knowing what to expect, and you come across big, glorious ideas about the world, just scattered in among the holey underwear and the bus ride to work? This 1998 Polish novel is one of those books. I love a book that cannot be summarized at all--there's n......more

Goodreads review by cypt on November 01, 2020

Lėta ir feel good knyga. Labai džiaugiuosi, kad skaičiau jau po Bėgūnų - man reikėjo prisijaukinti Tokarczuk, nes kai kažkada pasiėmiau jos Praamžius, atrodė išvis nei šis nei tas, kažkoks mito-etno, o man tuo metu reikėjo visai kitko. Dabar, jau žinant, kokia ji ir apie ką, atrodo, galėčiau bet ką......more

Goodreads review by Cláudia on August 04, 2021

Olga Tokarczuk escreveu uma obra singular e tocante, misturando sem parcimónia a natureza agreste de Nowa Ruda, pedaços das vidas dos seus habitantes, polacos e alemães, descrições de sonhos da Internet, receitas de cogumelos venenosos, questões fronteiriças e lendas de encantar. A narradora é recent......more


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