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Cassie Gutman's avatar

I am absolutely loving your newsletter! Apologies if you've answered this elsewhere, but I'm so curious where you find each book and choose on which one to read for those countries? It feels so overwhelming!

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David R. Grigg's avatar

This is a great concept for a newsletter!

I would like to share the best book I’ve read in translation this year. It has a great title, too: "Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead" by the Polish writer Olga Tokarčuk.

Others might consider this to be more of a literary novel than a crime novel, but of course there’s nothing to say that it can’t be both. It certainly features a number of murders and a mystery to be solved, so that makes it crime so far as I am concerned.

It’s written from the first-person point of view of Janina Duszejko, who is an eccentric woman in her 60s, living in a rural area of Poland. Several strange deaths occur in the area and Duszejko, who is regarded by her neighbours as a crank, sets out to investigate and puts forward her theory that Nature is taking revenge for offences against it such as hunting wild animals. Each death seems to add evidence to confirm this oddball idea. It’s a delightful book, and Duszejko is a wonderful character.

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