Olga Tokarczuk · 2014 · exile

Nine hundred pages, seven books and a page count that runs backwards - the novel the Nobel committee cited. Jacob Frank, an eighteenth-century Podolian Jew, declares himself the messiah, leads his followers into Catholicism en masse, and ends as a baron on the Main. It is all real, and Tokarczuk narrates part of it from the point of view of a woman who cannot die.

1. 1
   Rohatyn

   1752, a market town in Podolia. An old woman called Yente swallows a Kabbalistic amulet meant to keep her alive until a wedding is over, and cannot then die - and watches the rest of the book from a cave, from above.

2. 2
   Smyrna

   Jacob Frank's Ottoman years, apprenticed in the Levant trade and steeped in the Sabbatean heresy - and coming back to Podolia in 1755 with a following, a manner and a claim nobody in Lwow is prepared for.

3. 3
   Salonika

   The Donmeh, the Jews who followed Sabbatai Zevi into Islam and stayed there - and where Frank learns that a messiah can convert to another religion without ceasing to be a messiah, which becomes the whole plan.

4. 4
   Nikopol

   On the Danube in Ottoman Bulgaria, where he marries Hana and where the sect takes shape - and Tokarczuk holds the Ottoman and Polish worlds in one book, which almost no European novel does.

5. 5
   Lwow

   Lviv, and the disputations: Frankists and rabbis arguing before Catholic bishops over whether the Talmud teaches Jews to use Christian blood - and the Church burning the Talmud on the strength of what the heretics said.

6. 6
   Warsaw

   1759, and the mass baptism: hundreds of Jews received into the Catholic Church with Polish nobles as godparents, taking their sponsors' surnames - and Frank, whose godfather is the King, arrested within months as a fraud.

7. 7
   Czestochowa

   Thirteen years imprisoned in the Jasna Gora monastery, at the feet of the Black Madonna - where his followers come to him anyway and the confinement turns him from a heretic into something closer to a saint in their eyes.

8. 8
   Brunn

   Released by the Russians in 1772 and living in Moravia as a Polish baron on money nobody can account for - the sect now a court, with a daughter, Ewa, being groomed as the next incarnation.

9. 9
   Offenbach

   A castle on the Main, a private army in uniform, and a man who has been Jewish, Muslim and Catholic dying in 1791 as the Baron of Offenbach - and Yente still watching, from the cave, everything that becomes of them.