Flights

Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize, and Flights is the book that shows you why. It’s a novel about travel, the body, and what it means to be in motion — told in fragments, digressions, and stories that circle back on each other. There’s a seventeenth-century anatomist, a woman who disappears on a Croatian island, a man carrying his wife’s preserved legs across Europe. It sounds strange. It is strange. It’s also one of the most cohesive reading experiences I know.

Jennifer Croft’s translation is extraordinary — she won the International Booker Prize for it, and rightly so. This is the kind of book that makes you want to read everything else the author has written, and then everything the translator has worked on.