Nobel-Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s epic experimental novel The Books of Jacob is – perhaps unsurprisingly, given its title – a book about reading and writing.
At the centre of the novel are the Frankists, an 18th and 19th century Jewish religious sect. Within the more than 900 pages of Tokarczuk’s masterful account of the life of Jacob Frank – the self-proclaimed Messiah of the Frankists – we encounter several kinds of readers and writers. There are writers and readers of letters, authors and readers of books, chroniclers of lives and facts.
