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This should have been a winner. A book all about the creative possibilities of travel, mixing writer's notebooks, microfiction, and bursts of historical commentary? Count me in!

Like Olga Tokarczuk, I am someone who has never been good at putting down roots, and I strongly related to her early credo: ‘My energy derives from movement � from the shuddering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains' and ferries' rocking.� And I also share, with her, the (completely unjustified) sense of the redemptive powers of writing. ‘The narrated sin will be forgiven,� she says hopefully. ‘The narrated life, saved.�

On top of all these points of connection, I even read Flights in ideal circumstances. My copy is Pollocked with purple from where I sat with it over a bowl of barszcz in a Kraków bistro, smudged with fingerprints from when I gripped it too tightly during a bumpy landing in Munich, creased across the back cover after I fell asleep on it during a soporific train ride to Bern. It should have been a perfect meeting of reader and author!

But the jumble of different sections, instead of feeling productive, just struck me as scatty; I never quite gelled together the themes of travel and human anatomy; and the fragments of novellas left me vaguely unsatisfied and, to be honest, a little bored. I feel bad about this because Olga Tokarczuk has done something interesting and admirable with this book, and because Jennifer Croft has turned it into a lovely conversational English � but there you go. Perhaps next time I try her, one of us will have changed (and change will, as she reminds us, ‘always be a nobler thing than permanence�).