The Extinction of Irena Rey
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The Extinction of Irena Rey
Narrated by:
Lanessa Tremblett
Buy Now for £14.28
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Narrated by:
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Lanessa Tremblett
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By:
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Jennifer Croft
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.
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Critic reviews
Bizarre and brilliant . . . above all tremendous fun . . . The Extinction of Irena Rey teems with rabbit-hole delights at every turn right up to the delicious final twist.
Absolutely bizarre in the best way, it's a fever dream of deception and desire.
Translator Jennifer Croft sends up her vocation in this waggish literary mystery.
Wild . . . joyous.
Croft has constructed a canny exploration of how even English, despite its unique dominance, might be influenced by its brushes with the mysterious process that is translation.
Oh my mushrooms, The Extinction of Irena Rey is incredibly strange, savvy, sly and hard to classify. I also couldn’t put it down . . . mad with plot and language and gorgeous prose, and the result is a bacchanal.
The Extinction of Irena Rey surprised me at every turn, moving between profound observations about nature, art, and communication . . . and surreal and baffling happenings that push the characters into a kind of fever-dream reality. Croft has certainly added ‘novelist’ to the list of writing-related skills she excels at, and what a joy that is to witness.
Croft subverts expectations with a blackly comic, fiercely inventive drama that explores the cult of celebrity and the art of translation (an art this critically acclaimed, award-winning translator has mastered).
As bewildering and beckoning as its cover, Jennifer Croft’s locked-room mystery is something like Agatha Christie or Knives Out on mushrooms—ones not unlike those in the book itself.
Wrought in lively prose and complemented by a dazzling suite of meta-textual hijinks set to the beat of a mystery novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey is an empathetic and comic investigation of the role of the translator within the literary project.
Croft spins such a seductive tale, it’s impossible not to get sucked in.
[A] fun house of a debut novel . . . [The Extinction of Irena Rey] becomes not just a literary thriller but an examination of the delicate mix of desire, impersonation, ambition, and selfishness that the art of literary translation requires.
Croft never misses a beat, drawing upon her translation background to deliver a juicy, bordering on absurd, intricate mediation on celebrity, communication, nature and the art of language.
Croft has reinvented ecofiction with this seductive, erudite, and terribly funny tale about 'book people.'
The Extinction of Irena Rey is bursting with energy and cleverness, Croft’s abundant linguistic gifts and stimulating ideas on display
The Extinction of Irena Rey complects and complicates the relationships between translation and border politics, art and nature, image and text, truth and myth. It is about not just the extinction of its demigod-like author, but, perhaps, all of us.
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