Olga Tokarczuk can be called one of the most beloved authors among contemporary Polish readers—both elite and mainstream. Her new novel, "Final Stories" (2004), showcases the writing not just of a talented young author, one of the primary hopes of the "young prose of the 1990s," but of a mature novelist. The three female worlds revealed to the reader in three chapters-novellas are united not so much by the kinship of the protagonists as by a single universal problem: the experience of death—distant and near, someone else's and one's own. The characters in "Final Stories" blur the boundaries between being and non-being. They grasp death, trying to prepare themselves for it and to come to terms with its presence at the finale of every life. And, by grasping death, they understand life better, because death is a part of life.
But this is also a book about the need for love and freedom, about duty and guilt, about the estrangement of close people and the everyday drama of existence, about the imperceptible and inexorable repeatability of patterns of fate.
Author: Olga Tokarczuk
Translation: Irina Adelgeym
Pages: 288 (offset). Hardcover
Dimensions: 208x132x19 mm
