Book Club Guide
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
by Olga Tokarczuk · 2009 · Literary Fiction
Key themes
- Animal rights as a form of justice — and what it looks like when taken seriously
- The eccentric woman as the only honest voice in a violent community
- Astrology, William Blake and the detection of meaning in the apparently random
About this book
Janina Duszejko, an eccentric elderly woman who reads horoscopes and cares obsessively about animal welfare, finds herself drawn into a series of mysterious deaths among the hunters of her Polish village. Tokarczuk's eco-detective novel is also a polemic about the relationship between humans and animals, written with philosophical urgency and unexpected comedy.
Published in Polish in 2009 and English in 2018, Drive Your Plow won the Man Booker International Prize shortlist and was adapted into a film by Agnieszka Holland. Tokarczuk has been a vocal advocate for animal rights in Poland.
Discussion questions
- Janina Duszejko believes the hunters are being killed by the animals they hunted. How does Tokarczuk develop this claim — as literal, metaphorical, or deliberately ambiguous?
- The novel is a detective story but refuses the genre's usual comfort of resolution and justice. What does Tokarczuk do with the genre's conventions — and what does the subversion serve?
- Janina's interest in astrology and her love of William Blake are presented without irony. How does Tokarczuk use these systems of belief — as characterisation or as genuine intellectual argument?
- The novel is a polemic about meat eating and animal welfare wrapped in a murder mystery. Does the polemic feel didactic — or does the formal container prevent it from becoming preachy?
- Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize. How does Drive Your Plow relate to Flights — and what is she consistently working through across her novels?
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