The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

"Plus there is Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s English-language translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s deliciously titled The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story. The Nobel Prize-winner returns with what has been described variously as a “satirical take” and a “feminist twist” on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain . In Tokarczuk’s version, an engineering student retires to a sanatorium for tuberculosis sufferers, in Silesia, 1913. Every evening, the residents gather to drink the local hallucinogenic liquor and debate life, the universe, and everything. But there’s something unsettling going on in the woods outside the walls. “Happily, all the various unlikely strands come together in the closing chapters,” declares the Times Literary Supplement. “The eerily majestic finale is haunting, cathartic and gleeful – a zany confection that could only have come from this unpredictable, unique writer.’"