The Books of Jacob

• The boldness of the text (it counts backward instead of forward, is narrated by a woman who can’t die, has interpolated photos and pictures and many forms of prose), the transportive quality of the research, and the plot, which really gets its hooks in as it goes, is all very notable. And what a translation by Croft! Very grateful to have read it

• The Books of Jacob is a monumental work, featuring a superb English translation by Jennifer Croft. This is rightly regarded as Olga Tokarczuk’s masterwork, an immersive historical novel that breathes life into the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on the brink of partition. The society Tokarczuk presents is fluid and permeable. Languages and customs proliferate.

• The structure of the novel is that of a 'world-book', akin to other similar literary experiments: from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, but compared to these with a distinctly more metaphysical calling and a language that grants the written word the power to transport the reader into an infinite elsewhere.

• 'The Books of Jacob' is a sure bet for great literature. A novel that I highly recommend. It not only allows the reader to discover this Polish author, but also to learn and uncover more about Eastern Europe in the 18th century, and what the Enlightenment was truly like in this region.

• This is the story of Jacob Frank, self-proclaimed messiah of the Jews in the mid-18th century. Rarely will we read a novel quite like this. There are those who place it on the same shelf as War and Peace, or even Don Quixote. Let the reader judge for themselves.

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