Unfortunately, this was not the book for me. I went in excited to be within a new setting, rural Poland, and follow an interesting range of characters, but the book fell flat for me. I found the characters pretty unlikeable and dull. The writing within the book I thought was well done in how it walked the reader through the landscape and atmosphere of the town, but I just couldn’t get connected to the story or characters that inhabited this place.

There are books that don’t so much tell a story as rewire your sense of what fiction can do. The Books of Jacob may have won Olga Tokarczuk the Nobel, but this earlier novel—more modest in scale, set in a mountain cottage over a single year—makes an equally powerful case for her genius.

Structured like a dream diary crossed with a folktale, House of Day, House of Night weaves together tiny, domestic moments and surreal digressions. A neighbour might turn into a werewolf. Another falls into a months-long winter sleep. There’s a trans monk writing the hagiography of a trans saint. These are stories grounded in Lower Silesia—rural, post-war Poland—but somehow they shimmer with a magical realism once thought exclusive to Latin America. Where others saw grey, Tokarczuk finds colour. What once seemed too bleak, too provincial, she transforms into something quietly transcendent.

There’s no tidy plot. No elevator pitch. Instead, the novel invites you to dip in and out, to open it at random and read a single story, a single moment, that makes the mundane suddenly glow. Like a poet, Tokarczuk zooms out mid-sentence into something bigger—grief, love, history, exile—without ever losing the grounding of the everyday.

With every book, it becomes clearer why authoritarian regimes fear her. She writes with full-blooded freedom—drawing equally from what is "ours" and what is "foreign," indifferent to borders, intellectual or national.

This book was amazing, but very hard to describe how it made me feel. It had fantasy elements but I wouldn't call it a fantasy story. Odd, but in the best way is really the only way I can describe this book! I really enjoyed it.

Olga only writes exceptionally unique books. I loved Marta and the almost “slice of life” style of the novel, especially how not every storyline played directly into one another. It was different, in a very good way!

This is a book that small-town folks will understand and appreciate. Tokarczuk takes us on a journey through a small Polish village and introduces us to all of her neighbors, letting us in on all of the local history and lore. It's haunting, magical and beautiful all at once, with a certain sense of reality constantly swirling around in the background. I look forward to sharing this one with my friends.

Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read the free ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

DNF--the prose was just too weak to carry the lackluster story in my opinion, and it fell flat in it's own promises so often that I just could not bring myself to go past 40% on my kindle. May be worth a revisit one day, but in the present moment it was just very flat, very stale.

4 stars

The unnamed narrator and her husband arrive in a very small village in remote Poland. She meets her closest neighbor, Marta, and gradually meets other people and learns their stories. There are also stories from long ago that shaped the area in which they live.

OK, I have not given you a great explanation as to what the book is about, and that is because this is deemed one of Tokarczuk’s “constellation” novels. The stories with sit on the loose framework of the life of the narrator in her new Polish home, which is really only incidental. Sometimes the stories bump up against each other, but each stand solidly by themselves, to impart what the author wishes to say, often over several stories.

I was particularly taken by the story of the region’s saint, her mysteries, her presentation and so on. And Marta….such a lovely, strange mystery there! What, exactly, is the author saying about Marta?

Tokarczuk, winner of the Nobel Prize, is, as always, amazing. This is not my favorite of her books, but it’s well worth reading. Recommended.

Wonderful prose. I loved the premise but it felt a little flat at times. The writing was superb, and it was a good story overall.