For the avid reader, discerning collector and real literature / Olga Tolkarczuk - fan (to be),
a like new, bookplate signed 1st UK edition (thus) softcover with French flaps copy of
Olga Tolkarczuk
The Books of Jacob
Translated by Jennifer Croft
Fitzcarraldo Editions, London / UK, 2021
"In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas begin to sweep the
continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in
Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona;
visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a
charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In
the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman
empires, throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself
again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as
a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the
conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumours
of his sect’s secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly
iconoclastic beliefs.
In The Books of Jacob, her masterpiece,
2018 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk writes the story
of Frank through the perspectives of his contemporaries,
capturing Enlightenment Europe on the cusp of precipitous
change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence." (fitzcarraldoeditions.com)
"Olga Tokarczuk is the author of nine novels, three short story
collections and has been translated into forty-five languages. Her novel
Flights won the 2018 International Booker Prize, in Jennifer
Croft’s translation. In 2019, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature." (fitzcarraldoeditions.com)