House of Day, House of Night (1998) is a novel by Olga Tokarczuk. House of Day, House of Night, follows an unnamed narrator living outside a village near the Polish border with the Czech Republic. Through her mysterious neighbor and friend, Marta, she learns of the region’s past, hearing many unique stories. The novel features themes such as Borderlands as an Ontological Condition, The Coexistence of the Living Alongside the Dead, and The Use of Folklore to Challenge Reality.

The novel is one of Tokarczuk’s “constellation novels,” using various narratives woven together to make a novel. Like many of her other novels, House of Day, House of Night features elements of magical realism while also using folklore to explore the crossing of both literal and figurative borders. Several of Tokarczuk’s other works have appeared in English translation, including The Books of Jacob (2014), Flights (2007), Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009), and The Empusium (2022).

This guide uses the 2025 Riverhead Books hardcover edition, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature illness, death, child death, death by suicide, suicidal ideation and self-harm, substance use and dependency, sexual content, animal cruelty and death, mental illness, transphobia, and cannibalism.

Plot Summary

House of Day, House of Night is one of Olga Tokarczuk’s “constellation novels.” These novels combine fragmented stories into one narrative, united by a narrator. This novel contains 93 chapters and an unnamed narrator. The narrator and her husband, R., live outside a small village on the border between Poland and the Czech Republic. This village is in the region of Silesia, which has a complex history, having been a part of many different nations. Most recently, it was annexed from Germany after World War II, and Polish citizens from parts of eastern Poland taken by the USSR were moved there.

The narrator becomes friends with her neighbor, Marta, an old woman who is a wigmaker. Marta is secretive and mysterious, divulging little about herself or her past. Every winter, Marta disappears, and the narrator, obsessed with dreams, craves to know what Marta dreams about. The narrator searches online for other people’s dreams, believing that there is a science to dreaming. She finds that many people dream about similar things, and she believes there can be meaning in these similarities.

Through Marta, who tells stories of people both real and fictional, the narrator learns about the village, the surrounding area, and the people in it. There is their neighbor So-and-So, who found the body of their other neighbor Marek Marek, after he died by suicide. Marek Marek was a person with an alcohol dependency who felt as though he had a bird trapped inside him, fighting to get out. So-and-So did not report the death, and Marek Marek’s ghost visited him until the body was discovered.

There is the story of Krysia, who as a young woman dreamed she heard the voice of a man in her ear. She fell in love with the man, and the man fell in love with her. She tried to visit him, believing she had found his address, but when she met the man, she was disappointed that it was not him. She decided to believe her dreams instead of reality.

Franz Frost, the man who built the home the protagonist now lives in, grew panicked when he heard a new planet had been discovered. He began having nightmares, one of which showed him his wife feeding their son poisonous mushrooms and the boy dying. To protect himself from the nightmares he believed the planet was sending him, he carved a wooden hat. When he was drafted by the German army, he chose the hat over a helmet, and died. While he was at the front, his wife took their son to pick mushrooms, and did not see him pick poisonous ones. She fed them to him, and he died.

The protagonist visits a basilica with Marta, and learns of Saint Kummernis. As a young woman, Kummernis was sent to a convent, where she proved to be especially holy. When her father recalled her, wanting her to marry, she refused and ran away. She hid in a cave, resisting the temptations of the Devil and performing miracles. She returned to the convent and made her vows, but when her father discovered this, he attacked the convent and kidnapped her.

Kummernis’s father imprisoned her until she agreed to marry whom he wished. She refused food and water and prayed to God to free her from the femininity that made men covet her. God gave her his face, equipped with a beard. Her father was horrified, and enraged by the miracle and her continued resistance to him, he crucified her. Though a martyr, Kummernis’s story was rejected by the Church, who believed a woman with a beard on a cross was sacrilegious.

The narrator learns about Kummernis through a booklet written by Paschalis. Paschalis was a monk at a monastery who believed he was born in the wrong body. He identified as a woman, and when he fell ill delivering meat to a nearby convent, the prioress took him in, hiding him. She shared the story of Kummernis with him, and asked him to write her story in an effort to convince the Bishop of Glatz, and eventually the Pope, that Kummernis should be canonized.

When Paschalis completed the story, he brought it to the Bishop, who rejected it as sacrilegious. In despair, Paschalis lived with a sex worker, who helped him dress in her clothes and live as a woman. He eventually left her, deciding that he could decide his own identity.

A former German resident, Peter Dieter, returned to his village in Silesia, now an old man. He did not recognize his former home. He hiked up a hill, reaching the border with the Czech Republic. He gazed out at what was once a familiar scene, and died, with one foot on each side of the border. When border patrols from both nations found him, they moved him to the other side of the border, hoping the other nation would act. In the village, there is Leo, a clairvoyant, whose powers grew after his wife died. He predicted the end of the world, but after numerous failings, he accepted that the world had ended, and that the “normal” world he saw was not real.

Ergo Sum was a political prisoner during the war in Siberia, and resorted to cannibalism with other prisoners to survive. When he finally made it back to Poland, he became a teacher. He loved Plato, but when he read a line that explained how men who eat others must become wolves, he began suffering from lycanthropy, becoming a wolf every full moon. When he woke up one morning covered in blood, he found that he had killed a cow during the night, though villagers blamed the dog of a man named Bobol. In penance, he began working for Bobol as a farmhand. Eventually, he began donating blood multiple times every month, feeling as though he was not only helping others, but freeing himself from his past.

After the war, a young man and woman met in a recently vacated town, fell in love, and married. Their love was passionate, but over time, they drifted apart. The wife discovered a lump in her ovary, and the husband began travelling for work. While the wife began treatment and was home alone, a young man named Agni visited her, and they soon began a sexual relationship. She felt as though he healed her. When she had surgery, and the husband was home alone, a young woman named Agni came to cook for him, and they soon began an affair as well. Both husband and wife obsessed over Agni, though Agni soon disappeared once the wife recovered. They continued to drift apart, no longer telling the other “I love you.” Eventually, the wife fell sick and the husband cared for her, though she never thanked him, and a year later, they both died.

These are the stories of House of Day, House of Night. The protagonist learns of these people and spends her days with Marta and in the forest picking mushrooms. Interspersed throughout the chapters are recipes for mushroom dishes, though some are dangerous.