Flights

Nobel Prize and Booker Prize Winner

By: Olga Tokarczuk, Jennifer Croft - translator

Narrated by: Julia Whelan

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE

A visionary work of fiction by "A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald" (Annie Proulx)

"A magnificent writer." — Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize-winning author of Secondhand Time

"A beautifully fragmented look at man's longing for permanence.... Ambitious and complex." — Washington Post

From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller's answer.

Brilliant in word and voice

I was given this book (and Audi) for Xmas
I had not heard of book or author previously
I enjoyed flights the way I had enjoyed middlemarch or Emma
Read this novel in the moment
Don’t fret about sequence or chronology, just experience in the real time of reading
The narrator allows you to fly with flight of this unique, insightful novel/travelogue

Fabulous book, wrong narrator

Although this unusually structured novel should probably be read rather than listened to, I enjoyed the Audible version anyway. The author is an truly artist with words. Unfortunately, narrator Julia Whelan narrated this work at such a fast clip, I felt I was listening at +1.25 speed even though it was at normal pace. Wrong narrator for the book, Audible,

Difficult to follow

I think this book would be a great read, but unfortunatelly it was difficult to follow as an audiobook.. It wasn't always clear when one story ends, and other starts, especially with the very short ones.

An interesting, well-constructed dry experiment

The narrator was lovely, Tokarczuk is clearly brilliant. There are some fantastic sequences, but overall Flights didn't capture my heart or imagination.

My mind took flight throughout the time reading it

I started by thinking I wasn’t going to like this book. It seemed disjointed and confusing. I kept reading the title to see if I had missed a clue. But the author’s writing is so compelling, I kept reading and I found myself thinking and remembering things from my life that I hadn’t thought about in years. I became mesmerized and addicted to the book. What a magical web this author can spin! I can’t explain any more how I was carried away by her words!