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Published 28 August 2017
ISBN 9781925603149
Format Paperback
Extent 416pp
AU Price $34.99
NZ Price $38.00

Flights



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Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2018.

Flights is a series of imaginative and mesmerising meditations on travel in all its forms, not only the philosophy and meaning of travel, but also fascinating anecdotes that take us out of ourselves, and back to ourselves.

Olga Tokarczuk brilliantly connects travel with spellbinding anecdotes about anatomy, about life and death, about the very nature of humankind. Thrilling characters and stories abound: the Russian sect who escape the devil by remaining constantly in motion; the anatomist Verheyen who writes letters to his amputated leg; the story of Chopin’s heart as it makes its journey from Paris to Warsaw, stored in a tightly sealed jar beneath his sister’s skirt; the quest of a Polish woman who emigrated to New Zealand as a teen but must now return in order to poison her terminally ill high-school sweetheart…

You will never read anything like this extraordinary, utterly original, mind-expanding book. Many consider Tokarczuk to be the most important Polish writer of her generation and Flights is one of those rare books that seems to conjure life itself out of the air.

‘Criminally good—the sort of novel that in its subtle imbrication of fragmentary narratives feels reminiscent of a great story like Austerlitz but at the same time entirely new.’ Best Books of 2018, LitHub

‘Magnificently translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft, Flights has the scattered intimate quality of a personal diary, its magic wedded to its singularity. It’s an unexpected, funny journey into that most elusive of places—the human condition.’ Best Books of 2018, Entertainment Weekly


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.’ The Australian

‘Clever with a dry wit and beautiful black and white maps throughout the book, which added to the feeling that reading it was like stepping into a museum.’ Good Reading

Published 28 August 2017
ISBN 9781925603149
Format Paperback
Extent 416pp
AU Price $34.99
NZ Price $38.00

Praise for Flights

‘Tokarczuk’s peerless travel guide is actually a guide to living. Every word, observation, reflection and story embraces the importance of staying mobile in thought as much as in being…This is as brilliant and life-affirming as literature gets.’

Saturday Paper

‘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...Flights is an international, mercurial, and always generous book, to be endlessly revisited.'

Los Angeles Review of Books

‘In the vein of WG Sebald [Flights] knits together snippets of fiction, narrative and reflection to meditate on human anatomy and the meaning of travel: this is a delicate, ingenious book that is constantly making new connections.’

Justine Jordan, Guardian

‘a profound meditation on time, mythology, the self and human anatomy...[W]e drift along happily on her flights of fancy, as her travels across space give way to journeys through history and deep into the psyche. Jennifer Croft's bump-free translation only adds to the reader's pleasure.’

Chris Moss, Prospect Magazine

‘Flights is a passionate and enchantingly discursive plea for meaningful connectedness.’

Kapka Kassabova, Guardian

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

Adam Mars-Jones, London Review of Books

‘It will make you want to quit your job, shed your identity, get on a plane, get on another, stay moving and see everything of this world that you can.’

Powell’s

‘Tokarczuk’s approach, like Melville’s, is encyclopedic and multiform. She turns nothing away...Her discerning eye shakes things up, in the same way that her book scrambles conventional forms.’

New Yorker

About the author

Olga Tokarczuk

Olga Tokarczuk is the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Booker International Prize, for her novel Flights. She has received many other honours, including her country Poland’s highest literary award, the Nike, for both Flights and The Books of Jacob. Her novels Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and House of Day, House of Night have also been highly praised. She is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, a children’s book and two collections of essays. Her work has been translated into more than fifty languages. Widely regarded as one of the most important writers of her generation, she lives in the countryside near Nowa Ruda, in south-western Poland.

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Rights for Flights

Rights held: ANZ