Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night is a luminous mosaic of life in the Polish borderland town of Krajanów, where history, myth, and daily routine merge into a single, dreamlike whole. Told through a series of loosely connected vignettes—part folklore, part memoir, part local history—the novel blurs the lines between reality and imagination, revealing how stories shape both place and people.

Tokarczuk’s prose is quietly hypnotic, marked by precision, lyricism, and a deep attunement to the textures of ordinary life. The fragmented structure allows each piece to stand alone while gradually building a portrait of a community that is at once rooted in the past and open to the fantastical. The result is a work that rewards attentive reading, offering a rare combination of intimacy and mythic scope.

One of my reading goals this year is to consume more fiction in translation and I just love Olga Tokarczuk’s work. Her voice is so unique and enthralling - this novel is ambitious and challenging but also deeply pleasurable to read. It really transported me!

This feels distinctly like a Tokarczuk novel: it has some of the vibe of [book:Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead|36609308] where whimsy meets melancholy, some of the historical sweep of [book:The Books of Jacob|41724950], and some of the humour of [book:The Empusium|209807703], with even a mushroom recipe!

There's something charming about the way this small Polish village is constructed for us through vignettes which weave across time, using Polish folklore and fairy tale elements to get beneath the surface and create a kind of magic realism effect where a man may be part bird, for example. It's whimsical but it's also a profound revelation, a shorthand to psychological truths that give the story depth.

Playful, intelligent and compassionate at the same time, this feels like quintessential Tokarczuk.