Undiscovered Tomb was on sale over the weekend. The price has gone up now, but you can still buy it, and check out a bunch of other Egypt-related mysteries.
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.
Well, this one had an intriguing title, as you can tell. If you are interested in where the name comes from, it is from a poem by William Blake (author of The Tyger). A number of passages are quoted in the book.
In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
William Blake, Proverbs of Hell
Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk was on the “mystery” shelf, but I am not sure I would classify it as such. It does involve a murder (in fact, a string of murders) which are solved at the end of the book, but it is very literary and does not at all follow the plot of a sleuth trying to solve the murders. Rather, it is an atmospheric book where it is very easy to get lost in the details of the descriptions of the land and culture the characters live in (Poland).
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was originally written in Polish in 2009 and published in English in 2019. The book was shortlisted for a number of prizes, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature shortly after it was published in English.
I knew very early on in the story who the killer was, so I was not surprised by the ending.
The title of this book is longer than the teaser itself:
“Please get dressed. Big Foot is dead.”
Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . .
A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?
