House of Day, House of Night

A brilliantly imaginative epic novel of a small place by Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most daring and ambitious novelists at work today.

‘A magnificent writer.’
— Svetlana Alexievich, 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate

‘A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.’
— Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News

‘House of Day, House of Night is full of death, destruction and dreams. Written in 1998, and now translated into English, it is what Tokarczuk calls a “constellation” novel. It is made up of bits of memoir, dream diary, metaphysical musings and sketches of life in Tokarczuk’s adopted home of rural Krajanow, southwest Poland…. House of Day, House of Night is packed with chewy philosophical ideas and spellbinding images.’
— Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times

‘Alongside history and memory, Tokarczuk explores identity, transformation and the meaning of home…. Tokarczuk’s reflections are saturated with sensory language that conveys a vivid sense of the landscape and seasonal change – floods, meadow fires and gales. She also displays unnerving prescience in recognizing the latent force of technology and AI: the narrator imagines her partner’s sky photographs being uploaded into a computer to create one single image: “which is sure to mean something . . . And then we’ll know.”’
— Lucy Popescu, Financial Times

‘What emerges from this cornucopia of curiosities is a rich and pulsating view into life itself, which the narrator views as “beautiful despite the terrible things other people say about it.” It’s a marvel.’
— Publishers Weekly, starred review

‘As a whole, the book is at once simpler and, at the same time, infinitely more complex than it at first appears. An exquisitely constructed, mercurial gem from the Nobel prizewinner.’
— Kirkus, starred review

‘Tokarczuk is an excellent storyteller…. There’s no real plot, of course, and the stories don’t point in any clear direction, yet somehow the novel does achieve a kind of deepening gravity. That’s partly because of the history underlying it, of wars and border disputes, but also because so many of the games Tokarczuk plays pay off.’
— Ben Markovits, New York Times

‘[A] mesmerizing showcase of Tokarczuk’s skills at blending a scrupulous attentiveness to the most humdrum detail of village life in rural Poland with startling forays into the realms of the uncanny…. In what Tokarczuk herself has called a “constellation-novel”, she has brought together her own galaxy of compelling case histories and the result is unfailingly revealing. Her trusted intermediary, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is the best accomplice Tokarczuk could have wished for in another triumph of the translator’s art.’
— Michael Cronin, Irish Times

‘Olga Tokarczuk is inspired by maps and a perspective from above, which tends to make her microcosmos a mirror of macrocosmos. She constructs her novels in a tension between cultural opposites: nature versus culture, reason versus madness, male versus female, home versus alienation.’
— Nobel Committee for Literature

‘I told Marta that each of us has two homes – one actual home with a fixed location in time and space, and a second that is infinite, with no address and no chance of being immortalized in architectural plans – and that we live in both of them simultaneously.’

A young woman settles in Nowa Ruda, a village in Lower Silesia, a few dozen metres from the Czech border. The communist regime has just collapsed, but that is not the only noticeable change: the -surrounding houses, gardens and forests are full of vestiges of the time when the region belonged to another country. Together with her enigmatic neighbour Marta, the narrator accumulates the stories of the hamlet, from the history of its foundation to the lives of its saints, from anecdotes about its wonderfully unique inhabitants to recipes and gossip. Published in English in its original form for the first time, in a new translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, House of Day, House of Night is a brilliantly imaginative epic novel of a small place by Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most daring and ambitious novelists at work today. 

• | Author: Olga Tokarczuk, Antonia Lloyd-Jones
• | Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• | Publication Date: Sep 11, 2025
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language: eng
• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9781804271919
• | ISBN-10: 1804271918