Dua Lipa's Service95 Book Club Offers Details on January Monthly Read

Dua Lipa’s Service95 Book Club has shared details of January’s Monthly Read: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. Dua originally announced the month’s pick during her late-night appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in December, and starting now, the Service95 Book Club will offer exclusive content from Dua and Olga on service95.com and across socials.

“The hardest thing about Olga Tokarczuk’s amazing genre-defying novel Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead is knowing how to describe it,” Dua comments. “It’s a crime novel, but much more than a mere whodunnit. It’s also a call to arms, a philosophical interrogation that is peppered with surreal mediations on astrology, and a story that will make your blood boil while simultaneously warming your heart. When a local hunter on a remote Polish plateau chokes on a deer bone one winter evening, his death is shocking but easily explained. But when other members of the local hunting fraternity also start showing up dead, things start to get weird.”

Dua adds, “I loved Janina Duszejko, the opinionated and eccentric protagonist whose fixations on the radical 18th century poet William Blake, the rights of animals, and the use of astrology to solve crimes take this book in unexpected directions at every turn. Darkly humorous, deadly serious, and with a quirky cast of characters that will stay with you forever, this is definitely not to be missed. The author won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and when you read this novel you’ll see why,” Dua concludes.

In Dua’s interview with Olga, they discuss the ethical dimensions of animal rights, astrology as an art form, and the enduring impact of William Blake’s work. Alongside the interview, Olga has shared a reading of an excerpt from Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead, revealed her personal reading list, and created a playlist inspired by the novel. As with each monthly pick, readers can explore the discussion questions provided to spark their own conversations and analyses of the book.

Dua’s Service95 Book Club is the latest offering from her Service95 platform, which consists of the At Your Service podcast and the flagship Service95 newsletter. Service95 has been praised by The Guardian as "some of the most thought-provoking short-form cultural writing you can find,” and the podcast has been lauded by The Sunday Times, Vogue and Vulture. In addition, Spotify named it one of the Best Podcasts of 2022, and praised Dua as “an incredibly thoughtful interviewer with a genuine interest in people, social movements, and the arts.” 

You can follow Service95 on socials and YouTube to get the latest, and subscribe to the newsletter here to stay in the loop on upcoming monthly reads.

About Olga Tokarczuk

Olga Tokarczuk is one of Poland’s most celebrated authors and the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Sulechów, her parents were teachers, and she fell in love with books in her father’s school library. When she was a few years old and ill she read an encyclopedia, “This showed me the enormity of the world that lies before me and the effort I must to understand it.”

Olga is the author of nine novels, three short-story collections, and her work has been translated into more than 50 languages. Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead (Prowadz Swoj Plug Przez Kosci Umarlych) was published in 2009 in Polish and in translation was shortlisted for the 2019 International Man Booker Prize. Like Janina, Olga is a vegetarian, an environmentalist, and an animal rights activist. With Drive Your Plow she said, “I wanted to explore this question, which is at the heart of the book: what can we do as good people against a law that is bad?” Is Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead one of the first classics of eco-fiction? We think so.

About Dua Lipa

3x GRAMMY and 7x BRIT Award-winning global pop powerhouse Dua Lipa continues to be one of pop music’s leading forces with the release of her third album, Radical Optimism. Upon release, the album went straight to No. 1 in 11 countries, including the UK where it became the biggest album debut from a UK female artist in 2024 and garnered the highest week one sales from a UK female artist since 2021. In the US, the album debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart and No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart, marking Dua’s biggest sales week yet. The New York Times named it a Critic’s Pick and hailed it as “an album of nonstop ear candy,” along with Variety, who declared it “a joyous blast of pop savvy,” The New Yorker, who praised, “the instrumentation is a gleaming and impenetrable expanse, and the main attraction is Lipa,” and Vogue, who raved it is “a summary, self-assured slice of pop brilliance…[and] catchy as hell.” Following her electric set headlining Glastonbury’s 2024 Pyramid Stage, Dua has recently wrapped the Asia leg of her Radical Optimism World Tour, which will resume in 2025 and includes two shows at Wembley Stadium that sold out immediately.

Following its release in 2020, Dua's certified platinum sophomore album Future Nostalgia became the longest running top 10 album by a female artist on the Billboard 200 in 2021. The GRAMMY Award-winning album spawned multiple worldwide hit singles, with “Levitating” earning certified diamond status and the title of Billboard’s No. 1 Hot 100 Song of 2021. 

Dua has found superstar status on stage and off, thanks to her many passions outside of music. 2022 saw Dua launch Service95, a global style, culture and society editorial platform that now comprises a weekly newsletter, the Service95 book club and the Dua Lipa: At Your Service podcast, which has been lauded by The Sunday Times and The Guardian, and was named one of the Best Podcasts of 2022 by Spotify. Having graced every major fashion magazine worldwide from Vogue and Elle to W and Dazed, Dua added "designer" to her resume in 2023 when she co-designed Versace's "La Vacanza" collection alongside Donatella Versace herself, which Vogue deemed "the hottest collaboration of the summer."

Dua’s eponymous 2017 debut album is certified platinum, spawned six platinum tracks, and made her the first female artist in BRIT Awards history to pick up five nominations in a single year. Dua has a total of 10 GRAMMY nominations, with three wins for Best Pop Vocal Album, Best New Artist and Best Dance Recording. Additionally, she earned nominations at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards for her hit song “Dance The Night” from the box office sensation Barbie. Across platforms globally, she has amassed over 45 billion streams and holds the record for being the first female artist to have two albums with over 13 billion streams each on Spotify.

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