RaveThe Monthly (AUS)At close to a thousand pages, Tokarczuk’s epic historical novel has the heft and magnitude of a holy book ... It makes a near-mythical landscape of 18th-century Europe...and narrates, via a swirling system of richly detailed stories, thousands of moments in the lives of its many characters ... It is hard to imagine a more perfect pairing of writer and subject: Frank is complex, contradictory, his presence at once all-consuming and impossible to pin down; Tokarczuk is brilliant, sensitive, encyclopaedic, like a writer dreamed of by Borges. Together with Croft they form a kind of trinity, three figures combining to form one indivisible body ... Tokarczuk reminds us that the ability to express oneself through language is not a fixed, automatic process, but rather one that must be constantly renegotiated, and laboured over with great care.
