Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

"You know what, sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meaning for ourselves .... And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other."

Olga Tokarczuk

Janina Duszejko is a woman in her sixties, who lives in a remote and inaccessible, in the winter, polish village. She is an educated woman,  interested in astrology and fond of the poetry of William Blake, from whose work the title of the book is taken. A few months after her two dogs disappear, the members of the local hunting club are found murdered and Duszejko becomes involves in the investigation.

'Its Animals show the truth about a country', I said. 'Its attitude towards Animals. If people behave brutally towards Animals, no form of Democracy is ever going help them, in fact nothing will at all.'

Olga Tokarczuk

But Duszejko is not the witty elderly woman who likes solving crimes. She is reclusive preferring the company of animals to the people. And Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of The Dead is not a conventional crime story; it has a moral and philosophical twist to it.

It’s a compelling story and intriguing story about injustice, animal rights, feminism, corruption and hypocrisy, especially in traditional religion. Tokarczuk writing is distinctive and original, dark and witty, and Antonia Lloyd-Jones has done a remarkable job in capturing the sensitive and melancholic prose in the English translation.