The Hearing Trumpet, Paperback

An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Bj rk and Luis Bu uel.

One of the first things ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby overhears when she is given an ornate hearing trumpet is her family plotting to commit her to an institution. Soon, she finds herself trapped inside a sinister retirement home, where the elderly must inhabit buildings shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, endure twisted religious preaching and eat in a canteen overlooked by the mysterious portrait of a leering Abbess. But when another resident secretly hands Marian a book recounting the life of the Abbess, a joyous and brilliantly surreal adventure begins to unfold. Written in the early 1960s, The Hearing Trumpet remains one of the most original and inspirational of all fantastic novels.

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was born in England and spent most of her adult life in Mexico City, where she participated in the Surrealist movement as an artist, painter, and novelist. NYRB Classics reissued her memoir Down Below in 2017.

Olga Tokarczuk is one of Poland's most celebrated and beloved authors, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Booker International Prize, as well as her country's highest literary honor, the Nike. She is the author of eight novels and two short story collections and has been translated into more than thirty languages.