Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Olga Tokarczuk is among Poland’s most famous and critically acclaimed contemporary authors. She has received multiple national and international literary awards, including the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her most well-known novels and their translation dates into English are House of Day, House of Night (2003), Primeval and Other Times (2010), Flights (2018), and The Books of Jacob (2021).

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was published in Poland in 2009 but didn’t become available in English translation until a decade later. In this country, the novel was named to multiple Best Book of the Year lists, including Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Time, and NPR. It was adapted to film as Spoor (2017), which won an Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film. The book’s title derives from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” contained in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The novel is categorized as Dark Humor and Literary Satire Fiction, though it is also generally described as a literary murder mystery. This study guide and its page citations are based on the Riverhead Books Kindle edition published in August 2019.

The story is set in a remote village in the Table Mountains of southwestern Poland, just across the border from the Czech Republic.