Read our Monthly Spotlight for July: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Olga Tokarczuk’s subversive, entertaining rural neo-noir is anything but a conventional crime novel. Find out more about the book here, and enter our competition to win our new-look tote bag
Jul 07, 2026
Back in May, we asked you, our readers, to help choose our July Monthly Spotlight. You voted in your thousands, and the clear winner – with 44% of the vote – was Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
It’s easy to see why: the novel was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019, and is, without a doubt, a fan favourite. Tokarczuk – a Polish writer and activist – is one of the most critically acclaimed and influential authors of her generation. Her novel Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, won the International Booker in 2018, and later that year she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life’. Her work has been translated into more than 50 languages – it’s quite the résumé.
Originally published in 2009 and translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in 2018, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is set during a bleak Polish mid-winter, which may perhaps offer some readers an antidote to the current heat. It follows Janina Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her sixties, who recounts the events surrounding the disappearance of her two beloved dogs. When members of a local hunting club begin turning up dead, she becomes obsessed with the investigation. As the body count rises, Duszejko suspects something stranger is at work.
Drive Your Plow offers thought-provoking ideas on our perceptions of madness, injustices against marginalised people, animal rights, the hypocrisy of traditional religion, and predestination. It caused a genuine uproar when it was published in Poland: some critics viewed it as an attack on the country’s rural traditions and culture, and felt that it validated civil disorder in the name of environmentalism. Writing in the Guardian, Booker-longlisted author Sarah Perry described the novel ‘as a primer on the politics of vegetarianism, a dark feminist comedy, an existentialist fable and a paean to William Blake’.
Our July Monthly Spotlight includes an in-depth reading guide, an exclusive interview with the translator, a ‘where to start’ guide to the author’s best works, an extract from the opening chapter, and the chance to win one of five copies of the novel, along with a brand new, money-can’t-buy, limited-edition Booker Prizes tote bag.
Where to start with Olga Tokarczuk: a guide to her best books
Olga Tokarczuk is one of the most critically acclaimed and distinctive voices in contemporary literature. If you’re new to her work, here’s our guide to the 2018 International Booker Prize-winner’s genre-defying fiction
Written by Marek Makowski
Published July 6, 2026
When scholars look back on human narrative in the 21st century, they will study the lecture Olga Tokarczuk delivered at the ceremony celebrating her 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. Tokarczuk described her most important narrative principles – tenderness, ex-centricity, constellation forms – and the belief that, by changing the way we tell the story of the world, we can change the world itself. Across more than a dozen works of fiction, Tokarczuk has proven this to be true, transforming not just the centuries-old form of the novel but our understanding of how fiction can depict, interpret, and even intervene in the crises of our times.
For Tokarczuk, every book presents an opportunity to experiment with genre and point of view. She plays with the conventions of the horror, mystery, historical epic, travelogue, and even the illustrated book. At the same time, she seeks to expand the capacities of her narrators, to break through the limits of the first- and third-person points of view, and to achieve tenderness, ‘a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected’.
Tokarczuk’s writing bursts with multiplicity. It is uncanny and eccentric but always grounded in psychological narration. Tokarczuk once practised as a clinical psychologist, and she excels in telling her stories slowly and deliberately, uncovering the world through the mind of the narrator, one thought after another. This approach has allowed her narratives, written in Polish from a village in Lower Silesia, to become universal, translated into more than 50 languages worldwide.
One can only dream that others read us the way Tokarczuk’s narrators read the world: with a radical openness, with sincerity and understanding, and with a tenderness that maintains that yes, we are all connected, small but meaningful parts of a greater whole – and that no, we are not alone.
2018 International Booker Prize
2018 International Booker Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk and translator Jennifer Croft with Chair of judges Lisa Appignanesi.
