Speaking from her home in Wroclaw in southwestern Poland, Ms. Tokarczuk also referenced President Trump’s plan to build a wall on the United States border with Mexico. “Twelve years ago there was no mention of the idea of walls or borders, which were originally adopted by totalitarian systems,” she said. “Back then I must admit that I was sure that we had put totalitarianism behind us.”

Ms. Tokarczuk’s first book was a volume of poetry (“Cities in Mirrors”) published in Poland in 1989. She has since gone on to write eight novels and two short story collections, which have made her a literary celebrity in her native country. Many of these — such as her breakthrough novel “Primeval and Other Times,” which was published in Poland in 1996 — have been written in the picaresque tradition and reflect the upheavals of Polish history. “Flights” is not her only book to be translated into English, but it is the first one to establish her international reputation. Its journey to translation owed everything to the persistence of its American translator Jennifer Croft who spent 10 years speaking to editors and publishing excerpts from the book in magazines like N+1 and Bomb.

Ms. Croft, who received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to do the translation, eventually convinced the rising British independent publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions to gamble on “Flights,” which was released in Britain in 2017 to glowing reviews. “A lot of ‘Flights’ is about forging human connections and considering the other,” Ms. Croft said also via Skype. “So I think it happened to hit in the U.K. at a good moment right after Brexit, and I think probably that the reception in the U.S. is going to be similar.”

Ms. Tokarczuk, who worked for several years as a clinical psychologist after graduating from the University of Warsaw in 1985, spent time traveling alone during the period when she wrote “Flights.” “I had just gotten divorced and had a huge need to change my life,” she said. “I found that traveling on my own created a different state of mind because when you travel with your partner or a friend there is an endless tendency to exchange information, feelings and associations.”