Jennifer Croft
June 17 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Pre-Order The Extinction of Irena Rey
Magic City Books is excited to welcome back Jennifer Croft for the paperback release of The Extinction of Irena Rey on Tuesday, June 17, 2025 at 7:00pm. This event will take place at Congregation B’nai Emunah, 1719 S Owasso Ave.
From the International Booker Prize-winning translator and Women’s Prize finalist, The Extinction of Irena Rey is an utterly beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest. Publisher’s Weekly called it “mirthful,” “energetic,” “wickedly funny,” “absurdly entertaining,” “juicy,” “twisty,” and “poignant.”
The paperback of The Extinction of Irena Rey will be published by Bloomsbury Publishing on June 17, 2025. Books are available to pre-order at Magic City Books or online at: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/the-extinction-of-irena-rey-jennifer-croft-paperback-/3372
The Extinction of Irena Rey, as well as other books by Jennifer Croft, will be for sale at the event on June 17.
About The Extinction of Irena Rey
International Booker Prize-winning translator and Women’s Prize finalist Jennifer Croft’s madly brilliant mystery novel of interconnection, 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
“Surprised me at every turn.” -NPR.org
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.
Jennifer Croft won a Guggenheim Fellowship for this novel, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her memoir Homesick, and the International Booker Prize for her translation of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is the translator of Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula’s August, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob. She has also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She lives in Tulsa and Los Angeles.
