Ольга Токарчук - Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

‘Reading Flights is like finally hearing from a weird old best friend you lost touch with years ago and assumed was gone forever because people that amazing and inventive just don’t last. Wrong—they were off rediscovering the world on your behalf, just as Olga Tokarczuk does.’ Toby Litt

‘I have always considered her a person of great literary abilities. With Flights I have my proof. This is one of the most important Polish books I have read for years.’ Jerzy Sosnowski

‘ Flights could almost be an inventory of the ways narrative can serve a writer short of, and beyond, telling a story.’ London Review of Books

‘A novel in essays, a world-exploration in words, a soaring journey across space and through time.’ Nicolas Rothwell

‘Tokarczuk is one of Europe’s most daring and original writers, and this astonishing performance is her glittering, bravura entry in the literature of ideas… A select few novels possess the wonder of music, and this is one of them. No two readers will experience it exactly the same way. Flights is an international, mercurial, and always generous book, to be endlessly revisited. Like a glorious, charmingly impertinent travel companion, it reflects, challenges, and rewards.’ Los Angeles Review of Books

‘ Flights is a dense, challenging novel… its submerged themes and hidden insights are worth uncovering.’ Financial Times

‘Tokarczuk has a quizzical and highly observant eye, seeking and recording, turning perversely towards the deformed, the monstrous and abject… This all makes for excellent and entertaining reading as we are privy to scenes and descriptions from which our first reaction would be to turn away.’ Otago Daily Times

‘An indisputable masterpiece of “controlled psychosis”… Punctuated by maps and figures, the discursive novel is reminiscent of the work of Sebald. The threads ultimately converge in a remarkable way, making this an extraordinary accomplishment.’ Publishers Weekly, starred review

‘ Flights is a fragmented, bursting-with-life novel… A lively and strange collection of portraits of unrelated characters, all in transit, woven together by the narrator’s essayistic musings.’ Australian

‘This is a book about rootlessness in the grandest sense—which is to say it is a book about mortality.’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Every sentence lands with the artful cadence of a poet.’ Deborah Levy

‘A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.’ Annie Proulx

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Copyright © Olga Tokarczuk 2009

Translation copyright © Antonia Lloyd-Jones 2018

The moral right of Olga Tokarczuk and Antonia Lloyd-Jones to be identified respectively as the author and translator of this work has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published as Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych by Wydawnictwo Literackie in 2009

First published in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2018

This edition published by the Text Publishing Company in 2018

Book design by Jessica Horrocks

Cover images by Buyenlarge/Getty and Shutterstock

Typeset by J&M Typesetting

ISBN: 9781925773088 (paperback)

ISBN: 9781925774009 (ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia