The Peasants

One of Poland's most significant twentieth-century epics, by the 1924 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

A Penguin Classic

In the village of Lipce, scandal, romance and drama crackle in every hearth. Boryna, a widower and the village's wealthiest farmer, has taken the young and beautiful Jagusia as his bride – but she only has eyes for his impetuous son Antek. Over the course of four seasons – Autumn to Summer – the tangled skein of their story unravels, watched eagerly by the other peasants: the gossip Jagustynka, pious Roch, hot-blooded Mateusz, gentle Witek ... Richly lyrical and thrillingly realist, at turns comic, tragic and reflective, Wladyslaw Reymont's magnum opus is a love song to a lasting dream of rural Poland, and to the eternal, timeless matters of the heart.

Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont (1867–1925) was a Polish novelist and the 1924 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is best known for his four-volume epic The Peasants (Chlopi), which was originally published between 1904 and1909.

Anna Zaranko (translator) is a Polish-English translator based in the UK. She has translated Kornel Filipowicz's The Memoir of an Anti-Hero, for which she received the Found in Translation award in 2020.