Praise for Flights :

[Tokarczuk] seems to pour the contents of her incandescent mind onto the page.... Some bits read like campfire tales - stories of an inebriated, Moby-Dick-quoting ferryboat captain gone rogue on his daily route, or a foolish prince straight out of Arabian Nights.... Taken all together, Flights has the quality of a dream.... It's magical: electrifying, strange, and sensationally alive. -Entertainment Weekly

A revelation ... Flights is a witty, imaginative, hard-to-classify work that is in the broadest sense about travel.... In this risky, restlessly mercurial book, [Tokarczuk has] found a way of turning...philosophy into writing that doesn't just take flight but soars. - NPR's Fresh Air

Tokarczuk is such a talented redescriber of the world ... Her discerning eye shakes things up, in the same way that her book scrambles conventional forms... Like her characters, our narrator is always on the move, and is always noticing and theorizing, often brilliantly ... Tokarczuk's approach, like Melville's, is encyclopedic and multiform. -The New Yorker

[There's] no better travel companion in these turbulent, fanatical times. -The Guardian

A beautifully fragmented look at man's longing for permanence ... ambitious and complex. -Washington Post

[A]n intellectual revelation... Flights seeks out bridges between the concepts of cosmopolitanism and cultural hybridity; between discoveries of affection and curiosity toward unknown cultures, and toward the intrinsic multiplicity of one's own place of origin. -Boston Review

An unclassifiable medley of linked fictions and essays.... Reading it is like being a passenger on a long trip.... It's amusing, exciting.... It moves... to moments of intense interest and beauty. -Wall Street Journal

Provide[s] food for thought about what makes us move and what makes us tick.... Travel may broaden the mind, but this travel-themed book stimulates it. -Minneapolis Star-Tribune

This hypnotizing new novel about travel, movement, and the complexities of distance deserves a place on every bookshelf. It already brings with it heaps of praise-it won the Man Booker International Prize this year-but awards or no, readers should approach Flights with wide open minds and discover the book's profound meditations for themselves. -Southern Living

Travel writing usually presents a linear narrative-as departures and returns easily correspond with beginnings and endings. But Tokarczuk complicates this. Her characters, like the book's episodic structure, resist neat demarcations. They prefer to wander in loops and circles...The book is like a map: including disparate parts not because they cause or connect to each other, but because their contours help clarify a wider, impersonal whole. In this way, Tokarczuk shows that even the loneliest traveler fits into a bigger scheme. -Bookforum

Take the time to settle into this unconventional narrative that is by turns startling, moving and profound. -Dallas Morning News

These fragments seamlessly shift from first-person narration to third-person points of view, reflecting not only the associative mind of poetry or the magpie mind of the traveller, but also the cumulative state of the storyteller, where scene upon scene creates paths further. Despite the novel's own claim to refute unity, Flights coheres because of the voice of its narrator: an unassuming, humorous, and curious voice, ever willing to change and bring the world into its own palimpsest of worlds, regardless of genre, subject, time, or place. -Chicago Review of Books

The book pinwheels from somber to wryly funny to frantic with ease, and the myriad tones work together to build a layered, thought-provoking text...Tokarczuk's writing is endlessly penetrating and revelatory. -Music & Literature

[Flights] deftly explores, in limpid, captivating vignettes, the spaces we inhabit-bodies, geographies, the expanse of the page-and the loves, fear