My work fell somewhere between the archaeology of glueing together broken vessels and the building of a complex model ship, Tokarczuk has said of her writing. Indeed, the glue that binds these dug-up fragments together is squeezed through Tokarczuks sprawling imagination and its here her writing appears freer, less constrained by historical fidelity. Take this spine-tingling opening to one chapter: Every now and then, God wearies of his own luminous silence, and infinity starts to make him a little bit sick. Elsewhere, waves make their way across the golden fields of crops that stretch out past the horizon, and it looks as though the whole earth, soft and gold, were sighing. This is Tokarczuk at her most lyrical and beguiling, reminiscent of her 2019 novel Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead and 2018 Booker Prize-winning work, Flights.

With frequent digressions and tangents, plot marches forward to the beat of Frank and his heretical sects peregrinations across Europe. As he traverses the Ottoman and Habsburg empires and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth facing persecution, imprisonment, and plague his notoriety swells with hearsay and village gossip: one account tells of how Frank triggered a lightning storm simply by shouting into the sky while another recalls that, upon his arrival, cows gave birth to twins with strange colourations and chickens laid eggs with multiple yolks. To many Rabbis, his religious beliefs which mix Judaism, Christianity and Islam, denounce the Talmud and promote sexual promiscuity are outrageous. To others, his outlandish antics are proof he is the reincarnation of the 17th-century Kabbalist Sabbatai Tzvi and has come to lead the people out of misery. Poverty-stricken in Europes hinterlands, the masses want miracles, signs, shooting stars. They dont really understand Franks feverish diatribes, but because he is tall, handsome, and dressed like a Turk, he seems exceptional. In this sense, Frank resembles a modern-day populist leader skilled in the art of deception, a polarising figure whose stock is simultaneously up and down depending on who is asked.

Set across five decades, The Books of Jacob covers a lot of ground. Philosophically, Tokarzcuk interweaves arguments on Kabbalah, eschatology, antisemitism, ethics, and mysticism to name a few, expressing the simmering energy of the Enlightment period across Europe. This is embodied most directly by Father Chmielowski, vicar forane of Rohatyn, a real-life figure who created Polands first encyclopaedia, entitled New Athens. Just imagine, he says, everything at hand, in every library, noblemans and peasants. All of mankinds knowledge collected in one place. That The Books of Jacob opens with Father Chmielowskis quest for totality, is perhaps a wry nod to the books own Herculean intentions.

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The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk ambitious, daring, encyclopaedic - The Calvert Journal