(.) For all its forbidding weight, the writing remains fluid and engaging, often poetic. (.) Charismatic and with more than a dash of psychopathy, Frank is an endlessly fascinating character study, and it is easy to see why he is deserving of such generous novelistic treatment. (.) The Books of Jacob is an amalgam of vignettes and voices, histories and fragments, maps and illustrations. 'So outlandish and outrageously implausible is the story Tokarczuk tells that the novel strains at the limits of credibility.

Jennifer Croft's translation brilliantly captures the onward rush of Ms Tokarczuk's writing.' - The Economist In the living, breathing, mysterious world he and his followers inhabit, Ms Tokarczuk shows how ideas, along with fables, myths and delusions, made the society in which he flourished, which in turn led to the world of today. Its central question - the answer to which remains tantalisingly out of reach - is why people believe in the likes of Frank. (.) The Books of Jacob conjures up a society flooded with the new thinking that emerged from the Enlightenment and the French revolution.

'(A) wild, unruly beast - not just because it is more than 900 pages long.

With several maps and numerous illustrationsī+ : monumental, though its central figure remains elusiveīig, wide-ranging, detailed not quite a consensus on how successful it all is.

That the wise might have it for a record, that my compatriots reflect, laypersons gain some understanding, and melancholy souls obtain some slight enjoyment. Told by the dead, supplemented by the author, drawing from a range of books, and aided by imagination, the which being the greatest natural gift of any person.

or: a fantastic journey across seven borders, five languages, and three major religions, not counting the minor sects.

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The books of jacob fitzcarraldo