The Extinction of Irena Rey - Paperback

by Jennifer Croft (Author)

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

International Booker Prize-winning translator and Women's Prize finalist Jennifer Croft's madly brilliant mystery novel of transformation and translation in Europe's last great wilderness.

"Savvy, sly, and hard to classify. A bacchanal." -New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
"Fiercely inventive." -Washington Post
"Knives Out on mushrooms." -Elle
"Could only be written by master of language, a tamer of different tongues. It is brilliant, fun, and absolutely alive." -Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Eight translators gather in the primeval forest home of the world-renowned Irena Rey. They are there to translate her magnum opus together, but within days of their arrival, Irena disappears.

The translators embark on a frantic search, delving into ancient woods filled with strange flora, fauna, and fungi and examining her enigmatic texts and belongings for clues. But doing so reveals secrets they are utterly unprepared for, and they quickly find themselves tangled up in a web of rivalries and desires that threaten not only their work, but the fate of their beloved author herself.

Author Biography

Jennifer Croft won a Guggenheim Fellowship for this novel, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her memoir Homesick, and the International Booker Prize for her translation of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's Flights. She is the translator of Federico Falco's A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula's August, Pedro Mairal's The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob. She has also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She lives in Tulsa and Los Angeles.