319 pp. Author won Nobel Prize in Literature and Booker Prize. Her fourth novel. Translated into English from the original Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Although nominally a novel, House of Day, House of Night is rather a patchwork of loosely connected disparate stories, sketches, and essays about life past and present in a remote Polish village. A woman settles hree, where she knows no one. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of the living and the dead. There's the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There's the man whose death - with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech - was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history, but a cosmology.
