Books out this week come from Nobel winners and independent presses

Some kind of kismet continues to link Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke.

The authors belong to different generations, write in different languages and generate considerably different levels of controversy . But events unrelated to them conspired such that they learned of their Nobel Prize wins (Tokarczuk: 2018; Handke: 2019) on the same day and received those prizes at the same ceremony two months later.

Now here they are, unaccountably together again. House of Day, House of Night was one of Tokarczuk's first novels, published some 27 years ago in the original Polish. Meanwhile, The Ballad of the Last Guest is Handke's latest novel, its English translation coming just a couple of years after its publication in German. Yet both books share top billing on this week's publishing calen