The book, described by its American publisher Random House as “thriller cum fairy tale” and translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, had been shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker International Prize.
It failed to win the prestigious award, which Tokarczuk won last year for her novel Flights, but has garnered exceptional reviews.
Sloane Crosley of the New York Times called it “a marvelously weird and fablelike mystery… Authors with Tokarczuk’s vending machine of phrasing… and gimlet eye for human behavior… are rarely also masters of pacing and suspense.”
Meanwhile, The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino praised the book as “exhilarating in a way that feels fierce and private, almost inarticulable; it’s one of the most existentially refreshing novels I’ve read in a long time.”
“An astonishing amalgam of murder mystery, dark feminist comedy and paean to William Blake,” wrote Sarah Perry in the Guardian.
Writing in TIME magazine, Annabel Gutterman hailed the novel for being “a winding, imaginative, genre-defying story. Part murder mystery, part fairy tale, Drive Your Plow is a thrilling philosophical examination of the ways in which some living creatures are privileged above others.”
(jh/pk)
Source: New York Times/The New Yorker/Guardian/TIME
