Upcoming Meetings

Next meeting: Monday 17 March 2025, 6.30pm

The next Litfest International Fiction Online Book Club meeting will be a special Festival edition at 6.30pm on Monday 17 March 2025, when we will discuss 2018 Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s new novel The Empusium, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who will join our discussion.

As this is a ticketed Festival event, it will take place on Crowdcast — tickets are available here.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2018

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

‘Deft and disturbing…. In Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s crisp translation, Tokarczuk tells a folk horror story with a deceptively light and knowing tone … elegant and genuinely unsettling’ Hari Kunzru, New York Times

‘The book challenges you to think while still being slyly funny … There are three plot-twisting surprises, one that I guessed early on, one I was wrong about and one that floored me’ David Mills, The Times

In September 1913, Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. Someone – or something – seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczyslaw realise, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.

‘Despite the large (if mischievous) debt to The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk makes this novel all her own with her idiosyncratic blend of registers and genres.’ Claire Lowdon, Times Literary Supplement

‘Tokarczuk’s fiction is built on filtering fragments of the past – people, stories, myths, orthodoxies – through a contemporary lens…. The Empusium is much less a debate of ideas than a study of our perception and the limits of sensory experience …. This too is a novel that in Tokarczuk’s dexterous hands transcends its own limits, further cementing the Nobel laureate as one of the most original storytellers of our age’ Matthew Janney, Financial Times

Author

Olga Tokarczuk is the author of nine novels, three short story collections and has been translated into more than fifty languages. Her novel Flights won the 2018 International Booker Prize, in Jennifer Croft’s translation. She is the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Empusium is her fourth novel to appear in English with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Photograph of Olga Tokarczuk by Jacek Kołodziejski


Translator

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 International Booker Prize.

Join The Club

To join the Litfest International Fiction Book Club which meets regularly, usually on the third Monday of every month, email Bill Swainson at [email protected]

You can buy a paperback copy of this month’s book and other book club choices by going to our online bookshop and in this way – or by donating – support the book club and Litfest’s work. Thank you.