Primeval and Other Times

Set in the mythical Polish village of Primeval, a symbolic world inhabited by eccentric, archetypal characters and watched over by four archangels, this novel by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk follows the lives of the villagers throughout the turbulent 20th century.

Written in powerful, direct prose reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, the story unfolds in brief chapters called "Times," forming a fable-like narrative.

It is an epic allegory about the relentless passage of time and the conflict between modernity (the masculine) and nature (the feminine), set against the backdrop of Poland’s fraught political history from 1914 to the present.