The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft

The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY WALL STREET JOURNAL, ELLE, TOWN & COUNTRY, ELECTRIC LITERATURE, LIBRARY JOURNAL, CRIMEREADS, DOCUMENT JOURNAL, AND WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS * NAMED A MUST READ BY NPR, PEOPLE, VANITY FAIR, NYLON, ALTA JOURNAL, AND DEBUTIFUL

"Oh my mushrooms, The Extinction of Irena Rey is incredibly strange, savvy, sly and hard to classify. I also couldn't put it down." -New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

From the International Booker Prize-winning translator and Women's Prize finalist, an utterly beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest.

Eight translators arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Grey Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.

The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets-and deceptions-of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.

This hilarious, thought-provoking debut novel is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe's last great wildernesses.

Jennifer Croft won the Man Booker International Award in 2018 for her translation of Olga Tokarczuk's Flights from Polish. For her memoir Homesick, originally published in Spanish, she has received NEA, Cullman, PEN, Fulbright, and MacDowell fellowships and awards, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation, the 2018 Found in Translation Award, and a Tin House Scholarship. She graduated from Northwestern University with a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. The New York Times, the Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Granta, BOMB, VICE, n+1, Electric Literature, Tin House, Lit Hub, Guernica, the New Republic, The Guardian, the Chicago Tribune, and other publications have published her work. She splits her time between LA and Buenos Aires.