We are very excited to recommend Olga Tokarczuk’s latest novel, The Empusium, in an excellent translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. The official premiere in the US will take place on September 24 and in the UK on September 26.

The Nobel Prize winner’s latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas. A century after publishing “The Magic Mountain,” Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann’s territory and claims it with signature boldness, inventiveness, humor, and bravura.

September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone—or something—seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world. Little does the newcomer realize, as he tries to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

This book is recommended by Polish Cultural Institute New York.

Olga Tokarczuk (born January 29, 1962, Sulechów, Poland) is a Polish writer known for her wry and complex novels that leap between centuries, places, perspectives, and mythologies. She received the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature (awarded belatedly in 2019), lauded for her “narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” A best-selling author in Poland for decades, Tokarczuk was not well known outside her homeland until she became the country’s first author to win the Man Booker International Prize in 2018 for Flights (2017)—the English translation of her sixth novel, Bieguni (2007).

The daughter of two teachers, Tokarczuk grew up in a progressive intellectual household. She later studied psychology at the University of Warsaw, where she became interested in the writings of Carl Jung. After graduating in 1985, Tokarczuk took a job as a clinical psychologist but left after becoming disillusioned by the work. She obtained a travel visa and labored at odd jobs in London before she returned to Poland and published a book of poetry in 1989.

In 1993 Tokarczuk wrote her first novel, Podróż ludzi księgi (“The Journey of the Book-People”), a parable set in 17th-century France and Spain. It won the Polish Publisher’s Prize for best debut. Her third novel, Prawiek i inne czasy (1996; Primeval and Other Times), established Tokarczuk as an imaginative author and crucial Polish voice. The saga follows the inhabitants of a mythical Polish village through successive generations in the 20th century. In 1998 Tokarczuk published Dom dzienny, dom nocny (House of Day, House of Night), the first of what she called her “constellations novels,” stories that tell seemingly fragmented narratives. (Source: Britannica)

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by several of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, screenplays, poetry and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. In 2018 she was awarded the Transatlantyk Prize for the best promoter of Polish literature abroad. She is a regular mentor for the Emerging Translators Mentorship Program, and a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.