The sense of scale in this country differentiates it from trips in Europe, she said. She has seldom traveled to the United States but will be packing visits to more than half a dozen cities into two weeks on this trip. where the constitution is spelled out on every ticket, and where one's boarding pass is one's only identification as a citizen.'

She originally wrote the book in Polish about 12 years ago, but many of her observations about travel are fresh. She has won Poland's top literary award twice and is often mentioned as a possible recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Long a well-regarded writer in Poland, Tokarczuk has raised her profile recently in the English-speaking world, in particular with the translation of Flights, which won the Man Booker International Prize as the top translated book of fiction of 2018. 'This is a story of my obsession with mortality and the human body and why it’s so paradoxical that we can know so many things about the world around us and we don’t know anything about inner microcosm of our body,' said Tokarczuk, who will be at the University of Rochester on Friday, Sept. More broadly, though, it finds that very connective cartilage of permanence and transience, the home and the world, illness and health. In a sense, Flights is set in the airports, train stations and cheap motels of Europe and populated by wrinkled economy-class travelers and families looking for an off-season bargain on a beach-front cabin. 'Maybe there exists some sort of reflection of the great and the small, the human body joining within itself everything with everything - stories and heroes, gods and animals, the order of plants and the harmony of minerals?' 'Maybe in our bodies there's a whole world of mythology?' he wonders. In Flights, the recently translated, Man Booker International Prize-winning novel by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, a young anatomist has an off-putting epiphany.

Flights booker prize