The novel’s Polish release predated the newest and most apocalyptic visions of climate change-the ones that really keep us up at night. More importantly, it is the driving force behind humanity’s destruction of the natural world. But, she reminds us, this is a terrible way to see each other. “What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse?” Tokarczuk understands the insatiable drive we all feel to look for the usefulness in others above all other traits. That’s just a foolish distinction applied by people.’” Later, Janina ponders the implications of this distinction: “Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse?” she asks. The entomologist snaps at her, saying, “‘From nature’s point of view no creatures are useful or not useful. One day, as they are walking through the woods together, Janina asks Boros which of the beetles he has been pointing out to her are useful. Somewhere in between letter-writing, horoscope calculating, and checking on her neighbor’s houses, abandoned for the winter, Janina meets and befriends an entomologist named Boros. It is that, partly, but underneath the whodunit is another novel: one about how our obsession with usefulness leads to greed, and the devastating impact of both on the environment.

Originally published in Polish in 2009, Tokarczuk’s novel, published last month in English after translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, has been marketed as a murder mystery, albeit a strange one.

As far as Janina understands, the hunted are taking their rightful revenge. The victims were all hunters on the plateau, and in each case they have been surrounded by the fingerprints of animal kind. The culprits, she says, are the wild animals of the snowy Polish plateau that she calls home. The police do a terrible job of looking into the deaths, and Janina tries to help them out by writing long, increasingly insistent letters about the suspects being ignored. In Olga Tokarczuk’s newly translated novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Janina Dusezjko’s neighbors keep turning up murdered.

Drive your plow over