While for a young Polish husband and father of one, a vacation on a Croatian island ends in a nightmare and possible madness. Elsewhere, a present-day mother of a seriously ill son attempts to flee her grim daily life in a Moscow apartment bloc. Centuries earlier, an equally loyal pupil searches for his dead master’s preserved leg - which had been amputated years ago - in order to complete the master’s burial. Ludwika’s brother was the great composer Fryderyk Chopin, and following his death in Paris in 1849, she sets out to fulfill his wish and bring the most precious part of him back to his beloved Poland. That daughter’s righteous demand is reflected by the loyalty later demonstrated by a sister, who straps the jar containing her dead brother’s heart to her leg and conceals it beneath her skirt to evade Russian border guards. Now both men are dead and Josefine Soliman writes to Emperor Francis I of Austria, who had decided to have the “black-skinned” Angelo Soliman, born “around 1720 in North Africa,” an erstwhile acquaintance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, stuffed after his death and put on display, “wearing only a grass band.”

In life he had served the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, who had created a personal cabinet of curiosities in Vienna. Her father, an “esteemed” courtier and diplomat, had not died violently - yet he too had been dishonored after his death, in a curious way. While Antigone demanded her brother’s mangled corpse from a king, this woman is different. A GRIEVING DAUGHTER pens three carefully diffident, if increasingly determined, letters to an emperor, pleading for the return of her father’s body.

Flights book by olga tokarczuk