The Empusium

Olga Tokarczuk, Antonia Lloyd-Jones

From Shelf: Official Indie Fiction Bestsellers (week 2, 2025)

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate's latest masterwork, set in a sanatorium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

In September 1913, a young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, 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, blending horror story, comedy, folklore and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.