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Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

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Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

By: Olga Tokarczuk
Narrated by: Antonia Lloyd-Jones
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About this listen

With Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, Man Booker International Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk returns with a subversive, entertaining noir novel.

In a remote Polish village, Janina Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her 60s, recounts the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. She is reclusive, preferring the company of animals to people; she’s unconventional, believing in the stars; and she is fond of the poetry of William Blake, from whose work the title of the book is taken.

When members of a local hunting club are found murdered, Duszejko becomes involved in the investigation. By no means a conventional crime story, this existential thriller by ‘one of Europe’s major humanist writers’ (Guardian) offers thought-provoking ideas on our perceptions of madness, injustice against marginalized people, animal rights, the hypocrisy of traditional religion, belief in predestination - and caused a genuine political uproar in Tokarczuk’s native Poland.

©2020 Olga Tokarczuk (P)2021 Fitzcarraldo Editions Crime Fiction International Mystery & Crime Mystery Women Sleuths Women's Fiction Fiction Detective Crime Mind-bending
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A cryptic, beautiful story that demands a second read. The writing, as always with Tokarczuk, is top notch. The narrator makes some pretty basic errors around phrasing (a few sentences don't actually make sense the way she has split them up) and a few mispronunciations which could be forgiven but her style is rather tedious to listen to with a fairly predictable range of character voices that begin to sound rather similar. Definitely a reader rather than a storyteller. Despite this, give the book a go (or even better find a different recording), it deserves your attention.

A strange and meditative, beautiful story

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Brilliant story with perfect narration that brings out the humour and suspense of this clever tale

Intense and original

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Sublime, from start to end. The story is secondary to the themes, and that is good.

sublime

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I haven't read this in the written form, but I loved Janina's world and mind and the way Tokarczuk weaves her narrative.The narration is not great though and I found it obtrusive. In the end I had to stop listening. This was a shame, as I really wanted to love this, and I think with another narrator, or in written form, I would have.

Brilliant book, grating narration

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I loved this story- made me laugh and feel like I could imagine living out there in the cold winters with the colourful inhabitants of that border village

Incredible story that keeps you guessing and trying to figure out what happened

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