House of Day, House of Night

‘I told Marta that each of us has two homes – one actual home with a fixed location in time and space, and a second that is infinite, with no address and no chance of being immortalized in architectural plans – and that we live in both of them simultaneously.’

A young woman settles in Nowa Ruda, a village in Lower Silesia, a few dozen metres from the Czech border. The communist regime has just collapsed, but that is not the only noticeable change: the -surrounding houses, gardens and forests are full of vestiges of the time when the region belonged to another country. Together with her enigmatic neighbour Marta, the narrator accumulates the stories of the hamlet, from the history of its foundation to the lives of its saints, from anecdotes about its wonderfully unique inhabitants to recipes and gossip. Published in English in its original form for the first time, in a new translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, House of Day, House of Night is a brilliantly imaginative epic novel of a small place by Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most daring and ambitious novelists at work today. 

‘I told Marta that each of us has two homes – one actual home with a fixed location in time and space, and a second that is infinite, with no address and no chance of being immortalized in architectural plans – and that we live in both of them simultaneously.’

A young woman settles in Nowa Ruda, a village in Lower Silesia, a few dozen metres from the Czech border. The communist regime has just collapsed, but that is not the only noticeable change: the -surrounding houses, gardens and forests are full of vestiges of the time when the region belonged to another country. Together with her enigmatic neighbour Marta, the narrator accumulates the stories of the hamlet, from the history of its foundation to the lives of its saints, from anecdotes about its wonderfully unique inhabitants to recipes and gossip. Published in English in its original form for the first time, in a new translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, House of Day, House of Night is a brilliantly imaginative epic novel of a small place by Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most daring and ambitious novelists at work today.