Flights Signed & Numbered Indie Exclusive Edition

Flights is published here as a limited edition clothbound hardback as part of Fitzcarraldo Editions’ First Decade Collection, featuring marbled endpapers and signed and numbered bookplates.
The First Decade Collection is a hardback limited edition series featuring ten important books from Fitzcarraldo Editions’ first decade of publishing. Designed by art director Ray O’Meara, each book is casebound in fine linen cloth with custom marbled endpapers and signed and numbered book plates, with a run of 1000 copies each. The First Decade Collection reflects the breadth of Fitzcarraldo Editions’ contemporary publishing, which focuses on ambitious, imaginative and innovative writing, both in translation and in the English language, and marks a decade of publishing. The 2015, 2018, 2022 and 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature laureates Svetlana Alexievich, Olga Tokarczuk, Annie Ernaux and Jon Fosse are all included in the series, out on 24 October 2024.

Flights, a novel about travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy, is Olga Tokarczuk’s most ambitious to date. It interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. From the seventeenth century, we have the story of the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen, who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg. From the eighteenth century, we have the story of a North African-born slave turned Austrian courtier stuffed and put on display after his death. In the nineteenth century, we follow Chopin’s heart as it makes the covert journey from Paris to Warsaw. In the present we have the trials of a wife accompanying her much older husband as he teaches a course on a cruise ship in the Greek islands, and the harrowing story of a young husband whose wife and child mysteriously vanish on a holiday on a Croatian island. With her signature grace and insight, Olga Tokarczuk guides the reader beyond the surface layer of mo- dernity and towards the core of the very nature of humankind.

‘A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.’ - Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News

‘One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.’ - The Economist

‘Flights works like a dream does: with fragmentary trails that add up to a delightful reimagining of the novel itself.’...read more...