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The Empusium

A Health Resort Horror Story

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The Empusium

Written by: Olga Tokarczuk
Narrated by: Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Natasha Soudek
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About this listen

AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER!

“A folk horror story with a deceptively light and knowing tone … elegant and genuinely unsettling.”–The New York Times Book Review

The Nobel Prize winner’s latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas

September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone—or something—seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world. Little does the newcomer realize, as he tries to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, with signature boldness, inventiveness, humor, and bravura.

©2024 Olga Tokarczuk (P)2024 Penguin Audio
Historical Metaphysical & Visionary

Critic Reviews

“Deft and disturbing. . . In Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s crisp translation, Tokarczuk tells a folk horror story with a deceptively light and knowing tone. . . elegant and genuinely unsettling.”—Hari Kunzru, The New York Times Book Review

“In Tokarczuk’s hands, the staid genre of the bildungsroman erupts with sinister possibility…. A grand fantasy of revenge …taut, febrile.”—Washington Post

“A novel that in Tokarczuk’s dexterous hands transcends its own limits, further cementing the Nobel laureate as one of the most original storytellers of our age. Equipped with only our measly five senses, it leaves us questioning—just like her characters—what might be hiding in plain sight.”—Financial Times

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