Flights

By: Olga Tokarczuk, Jennifer Croft - translator

Narrated by: Julia Whelan

Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize

National Book Award Finalist for Translated Literature

A visionary work of fiction by "A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald" (Annie Proulx)

"A magnificent writer." (Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize-winning author of Secondhand Time)

"A beautifully fragmented look at man's longing for permanence.... Ambitious and complex." (Washington Post)

From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration.

Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. "Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going?" we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller's answer.

©2018 Olga Tokarczuk; translation Jennifer Croft (P)2018 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"What’s in a novel? This Man Booker International Prize winner reads like a rigorous response to that question in the best, most edifying (and maddening) way…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." (Entertainment Weekly)

“A revelation … Flights is a witty, imaginative, hard-to-classify work that is in the broadest sense about travel…. In this risky, restlessly mercurial book, Tokarczuk has found a way of turning…philosophy into writing that doesn't just take flight but soars.” (NPR’s “Fresh Air”)

“A beautifully fragmented look at man’s longing for permanence...ambitious and complex.” (Washington Post)

“It’s a busy, beautiful vexation, this novel, a quiver full of fables of pilgrims and pilgrimages, and the reasons - the hidden, the brave, the foolhardy - we venture forth into the world …In Jennifer Croft’s assured translation, each self-enclosed account is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language balletic, unforced.” (The New York Times)