Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Calling Drive Your Plow a murder mystery is a bit like calling Beloved a ghost story. There is a series of unsolved murders (which—spoiler!—are solved), but the real story is in the storyteller: Janina Duszejko, a reclusive, strong-opinioned, sixtyish woman living in a village in southwest Poland, who loves animals and William Blake and is certain of the truths of astrology. Like the narrator of Milkman, she prefers nicknames to given ones (including her own); like Ottessa Moshfegh's narrators, she sometimes courts the repulsion of her neighbors. Like both, she has a voice like no other, and Tokarczuk's novel is a scathing portrait of a place and an illuminating one of the inner life of a fiercely idiosyncratic woman. One of the best books I've read this year.