New Books (Tokarczuk, Watson, Folarin)

Reviews of Olga Tokarczuk’s “Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead” (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones), Lyall Watson’s “Heaven’s Breath,” and Tope Folarin’s “A Particular Kind of Black Man”

In the lofty Polish hamlet of Luftzug, the skies are low, the winters harsh, and the cell signal perpetually uncertain of its nationality. The highlight of the social calendar is a mushroom-picker’s ball, and the favorite sport of every man from the local playboy to the parish priest is hunting. They do it legally and illegally, alone and in recreational associations, with shotguns and trip-wire snares, and from cross-shaped wooden platforms called pulpits.