Jennifer Croft presenting “The Extinction of Irena Rey” in conversation with HANNA HALPERIN

Harvard Book Store welcomes JENNIFER CROFT—International Booker prize-winning translator of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights and The Books of Jacob—for a discussion of her new novel The Extinction of Irena Rey. She will be joined in conversation by HANNA HALPERIN—award-winning author of Something Wild and I Could Live Here Forever.

About The Extinction of Irena Rey

Eight translators arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.

The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets—and deceptions—of Irena Rey’s that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.

This hilarious, thought-provoking debut by award-winning translator and author Jennifer Croft is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe’s last great wildernesses.