The Extinction of Irena Rey - Hardcover

Croft, Jennifer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1639731709 ISBN 13: 9781639731701

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024

Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY WALL STREET JOURNAL, ELLE, TOWN & COUNTRY, ELECTRIC LITERATURE, LIBRARY JOURNAL, CRIMEREADS, DOCUMENT JOURNAL, AND WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS * NAMED A MUST READ BY NPR, PEOPLE, VANITY FAIR, NYLON, ALTA JOURNAL, AND DEBUTIFUL

"Oh my mushrooms, The Extinction of Irena Rey is incredibly strange, savvy, sly and hard to classify. I also couldn't put it down." -New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

From the International Booker Prize-winning translator and Women's Prize finalist, an utterly beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest.

Eight translators arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Grey Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.

The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets-and deceptions-of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.

This hilarious, thought-provoking debut novel is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe's last great wildernesses.

About this title

About the Author

Jennifer Croft won a Guggenheim Fellowship for this novel, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her memoir, Homesick, and the International Booker Prize for her translation of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's Flights. She is also the translator of Federico Falco's A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula's August, Pedro Mairal's The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob. She has received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She lives in Tulsa.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1639731709
• ISBN 13: 9781639731701
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320