'An unclassifiable medley of linked fictions and essays, the book occupies no fixed setting or place in time and its travels obey no established itinerary. Unlike the maps and guidebooks it scorns, it never attempts to reach easy definition or clear meaning, and it's through this refusal to answer its own questions-about who people are or what the world is like-that it gains its power, its awestriking scope and fractal, refractive insights.' Tokarczuk's writing is endlessly penetrating and revelatory. ' Flights is a humanistic text, one unafraid of sorrow and pain, nor of wisdom and humor. Sebald in this work: Whereas what lingers of Sebald's works are the emotions he conjures up, what lingers of Tokarczuk are her ideas.' 'Tokarczuk reads like a more cerebral W.G. 'A welcome introduction to a major author and a pleasure for fans of contemporary European literature.' Eileen Battersby, Los Angeles Review of Books Like a glorious, charmingly impertinent travel companion, it reflects, challenges, and rewards.' Flights is an international, mercurial, and always generous book, to be endlessly revisited. No two readers will experience it exactly the same way. A select few novels possess the wonder of music, and this is one of them. 'Tokarczuk is one of Europe's most daring and original writers, and this astonishing performance is her glittering, bravura entry in the literature of ideas. Sebald, Flights knits together snippets of fiction, narrative and reflection to meditate on human anatomy and the meaning of travel: this is a delicate, ingenious book that is constantly making new connections.' The threads ultimately converge in a remarkable way, making this an extraordinary accomplishment.'

Punctuated by maps and figures, the discursive novel is reminiscent of the work of Sebald. 'An indisputable masterpiece of 'controlled psychosis.'. Adam Mars-Jones, London Review of Books she can give the impression, not of passing on meanings long after the event, but of being the present at the moment when language reached out to thought.' Jennifer Croft's translation is exceptionally adventurous. The cascades of concise interstitial passages are often satisfying riffs on time and space, bodies and language, repetition and uniqueness. Much of the pleasure of reading Flights comes from the essay clusters embedded between sections of narratives. The book's prose is a lucid medium in which narrative crystals grow to an ideal size, independent structures not disturbing the balance of the whole. ' Flights could almost be an inventory of the ways narrative can serve a writer short of, and beyond, telling a story. 'One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.' Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize in Literature laureate 2015

Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News

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