Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Longlist, National Book Awards 2019 for Translated Literature

ISBN 9780525541332
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House |
author photo of Olga Tokarczuk. (Photo credit: Lukasz Giza)
Olga Tokarczuk

Olga Tokarczuk has won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the International Booker Prize, among many other honors. She is the author of a dozen works of fiction, two collections of essays, and a children’s book; her work has been translated into 50 languages. More about this author >

Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Antonia Lloyd-Jones is the 2018 winner of the Transatlantyk Award for outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad. In February 2019, she was awarded a Gloria Artis medal for her contribution to the promotion of Polish culture. More about this author >

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From the publisher:

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. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . .

A 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. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?

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