Olga Tokarczuk - Outrora e Outros Tempos

Once Upon a Time is a Polish village situated in the center of the world and protected by four archangels. This mythical village, where the grass bleeds, clothes have memories, and animals speak through images, is populated by eccentric and unforgettable characters – humans, animals, plants, minerals – whose existences obey the cycles of the seasons and the inexorable passage of their Time, but also external events.

For three generations, this unstable and captivating microcosm witnesses the outbreak of a Great War, the Crisis, a new and Second Great War, the Nazi Occupation, the Russian invasion, and the clash between modernity and nature, mirroring the dramatic history of 20th-century Poland.

Olga Tokarczuk's first major success, winner of the prestigious Koscielski Foundation Prize, Once Upon a Time and Other Times is a historical, philosophical, mythological novel and, according to critics, "a classic of contemporary European literature". The author always wanted to write a book like this: "The story of a world that, like all living things, is born, grows, and then dies… Kitchens, bedrooms, childhood memories, dreams and insomnia, reminiscences and amnesia are part of its existential and acoustic spaces, composing the different voices of its history."

"Discreetly powerful, this is a fable that will endure in our memories."

World Literature Today