"In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind – that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that's constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences: in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility."

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead begins in a very unassuming way, so unassuming, in fact, that we may imagine we're in for a slow character study of our protagonist, Janina, an older woman who lives alone in a remote Polish village.

And yet, within a few paragraphs, it becomes very clear there's more here than meets the eye.

Janina isn't a people person, but she loves animals, astrology, and the poetry of William Blake.

And when villagers start dropping like flies around her, she won't just sit idly by.

With exquisitely thoughtful prose and characters that jump off the page, Tokarczuk creates a compulsively quotable literary murder mystery with a message that needs to be heard.

On worth:

"But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless."

On institutions:

"Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion."

On the human condition:

"As I gazed at the black-and-white landscape of the Plateau I realized that sorrow is an important word for defining the world. It lies at the foundations of everything, it is the fifth element, the quintessence."

And most notably, our treatment of non-human animals:

"Its Animals show the truth about a country," I said. "Its attitude toward Animals. If people behave brutally toward Animals, no form of democracy is ever going to help them, in fact nothing will at all."

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is an award-winning work of fiction for a reason, and I recommend it highly.