FLIGHTS
‘A magnificent writer.’ Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize in Literature laureate 2015
‘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 profound meditation on time, mythology, the self and human anatomy…We 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.’ Prospect Magazine
‘Tokarczuk examines questions of travel in our increasingly interconnected and fast-moving world…Trained as a psychologist, Tokarczuk is interested in what connects the human soul and body. It is a leitmotif that, despite the apparent lack of a single plot, tightly weaves the text’s different strands—of fiction, memoir and essay—into a whole.’ Spectator
‘One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.’ Economist
‘The book is a personal, yet universal mythology of travel, a cabinet of curiosities, a box with old tickets, museum leaflets, shells and beer mats collected on the way. What we can touch, whether it is our own body, someone else’s hand in spontaneous dance, a crumbled leaf from a particularly important tree—all those things are imbued with meaning that, in Tokarczuk’s telling, becomes greater than the grand narratives history and politics have been feeding us.’ Glasgow Review of Books
‘Olga Tokarczuk is a household name in Poland and one of Europe’s major humanist writers, working here in the continental tradition of the “thinking” or essayistic novel. Flights has echoes of W. G. Sebald, Milan Kundera…but Tokarczuk inhabits a rebellious, playful register very much her own…Flights is a passionate and enchantingly discursive plea for meaningful connectedness…Hotels on the continent would do well to have a copy of Flights on the bedside table. I can think of no better travel companion in these turbulent, fanatical times.’ Guardian
‘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