ABOUT
THE BOOK

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 whodunnit.

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? Who is worthy of a voice?

Dramatised reading of  Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, performed by Cathy Belton. Produced by Bazar Productions.

In this special podcast series, Caelainn Hogan and Jessica Traynor explore Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead  and speak to author Olga Tokarczuk.

Comments from the Judging Panel

Olga Tokarczuk’s eccentric, wry, headstrong narrator, Janina Duszejko, a former bridge-construction engineer, animal lover and environmentalist, ‘made for a life of solitude’, gives an engaging and compelling account of a threatened planet, of life and of five mysterious deaths in a remote district on the Polish-Czech border. With humour, often black and anarchic, and believing that ‘the best conversations are with yourself’, Duszejko, now in her sixties, in an immediate, vivid and companionable narrative, explores astronomy, religion, William Blake’s poetry. Though Tokarczuk’s Janina believes ‘sorrow is an important word for defining the world’, the reader is invited to rethink patriarchy, power, authority in what is ultimately an uplifting novel.