Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Let's start by saying that there is a lot going on in this book, and I am not sure that I entirely unraveled the full meaning.  It does not leave anyone wondering why she won the Nobel Prize.
The novel is almost impossible to categorize. 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. 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.  She is complex character, an engineer and teacher who is now retired, someone who is chronically sick and deeply troubled by the world around her.  And she is surrounded by neighbors who keep turning up murdered.
Though the book functions perfectly as noir crime – moving towards a denouement that, for sleight of hand and shock, should draw admiration from the most seasoned Christie devotee – its chief preoccupation is with unanswerable questions of free will versus determinism, and with existential unease. What, it asks, does it mean to be human, and what is it to be an animal, and what objective distinctions can be made between the two?