It is fitting that the spirit of Blake is so insistently present in the novel (the title is taken from his poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and each chapter is headed by a Blake quotation): he wrote that “all wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap”, and would have shared the narrator’s horror at the village’s macho hunting culture. The reader wonders if the novel will take a turn towards magic realism: when a victim is found with deerprints hectically marking the snow all around him, it seems entirely feasible that, as Janina professes to believe, animals are committing murder. When Big Foot is found murdered, a shard of bone jammed down his throat, in the first of a spate of violent deaths, Janina believes that the key to the mystery lies in her village’s love of hunting, both for sport and for meat. She is also chronically sick, with an illness that is never defined and seems to constitute an essential part of her character: but she entertains no self-pity, writing: “Sometimes I think that only the sick are truly healthy.” She christens her friends and neighbours according to their nature – Big Foot, Oddball, Dizzy, Good News – and has an intense affinity for the local deer, whom she calls her “young ladies”. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian ‘A woman who combines an extraordinary intellect with an anarchic sensibility.’ Olga Tokarczuk.

Deeply troubled about the world, her place in it and the hierarchy of humans among their fellow animals, she is often moved to dreadful melancholy, such as when she watches a pregnant woman reading a newspaper, and wonders: “How could one possibly know all this and not miscarry?” Her narrative voice gives the novel an instant propulsive charm: she exists, immediately, on the page – forthright, brilliant, funny, given to capitalising words in a fashion that recalls Tristram Shandy (“I combine the Practical and the Sentimental”). A bridge engineer turned schoolteacher, now reluctantly in retirement, she is devoted to Blake, and to studying astrological charts in order to make sense out of chaos. Janina tells us on the first page that she is “already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night”.

But a mere whodunit would hardly satisfy a novelist who said “just writing a book to know who is the killer is wasting paper and time”, and so it is also a primer on the politics of vegetarianism, a dark feminist comedy, an existentialist fable and a paean to William Blake. It is, in effect, a murder mystery: in the bleak Polish midwinter, men in an isolated village are being murdered, and it is left to Janina Duszejko, a kind of eastern European Miss Marple, to identify the murderer. The novel is almost impossible to categorise.

Olga drive your plow