Book Club Guide

Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk · 2007 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Movement as the human condition — and what we flee
The body and its travels — anatomy, preservation, the dead who move
The novel that refuses to be one thing

About this book

A series of loosely connected narratives, fragments and reflections — some fiction, some essay, some travel writing — circling the themes of flight, the body, movement and what we leave behind. Tokarczuk's International Booker Prize and Nobel Prize-winning novel resists conventional form to create something that accumulates rather than argues.

Originally published in Polish in 2007 and translated into English in 2017, Flights won the International Booker Prize in 2018. Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019 (awarded for 2018).

Discussion questions

The novel is formally fragmented — many short sections of fiction, travel writing and essay. What does this form say about Tokarczuk's subject — and does the accumulation create meaning or simply defer it?
The recurring theme is human bodies in transit — anatomised, preserved, scattered. What is Tokarczuk saying through this dark preoccupation with the physical body and its fate?
Several of the novel's more extended sections involve historical figures — Chopin's heart, a 17th-century Dutch anatomist. How does Tokarczuk use these historical threads alongside the contemporary ones?
The novel won the International Booker Prize and Tokarczuk subsequently won the Nobel Prize. What does Flights do that earns this recognition — and is its formal difficulty a strength or an obstacle?
Poland is the novel's invisible centre — its trauma, its history, its specific relationship to movement and displacement. Does Flights work without this context — and what does it gain if you know it?