The Books of Jacob

Tokarczuk spent seven years on this account of Jacob Frank, the eighteenth-century self-proclaimed messiah whose heterodox movement pulled thousands of Polish Jews toward conversion and upheaval, and the novel's ambition is structural as much as historical: it runs backward in its page numbers, mixes documentary fragments with invented testimony, and refuses a single authoritative narrator for a figure whose own contemporaries couldn't agree on whether he was a fraud or a visionary. What makes it more than a costume drama is Tokarczuk's insistence on comedy inside the upheaval, court intrigue and theological argument shot through with folk humor, so that the book's tragedies never feel staged for solemnity alone. Critics treated it as a culmination of her project of using historical margins to interrogate national myth-making, and the scale, several hundred pages tracking a sprawling cast across decades, is clearly the point rather than an accident of ambition.