- Published: 05/01/2017
- ISBN: 9781846276088
- Granta Books
- 160 pages
Swallowing Mercury
Wioletta Greg
Translated by Eliza Marciniak
Wiola lives in a close-knit agricultural community. Wiola has a black cat called Blackie. Wiola’s father was a deserter but now he is a taxidermist. Wiola’s mother tells her that killing spiders brings on storms. Wiola must never enter the seamstress’s ‘secret’ room. Wiola collects matchbox labels. Wiola is a good Catholic girl brought up with fables and nurtured on superstition. Wiola lives in a Poland that is both very recent and lost in time.
Swallowing Mercury is about the ordinary passing of years filled with extraordinary days. In vivid prose filled with texture, colour and sound, it describes the adult world encroaching on the child’s. From childhood to adolescence, Wiola dances to the strange music of her own imagination.
£12.99
Entrancing... Greg achieves a form of literary alchemy that mesmerizes for its ability to situate us inside a personal landscape where both the eternal past and unfolding present feel as if they can exist simultaneously
Inara Verzemnieks, New York Times
Greg writes with a precise, strange charm, and the poet's acute sensitivity to detail. Little by little, I felt the presence of young Wiola appear beside me - vital, quick-witted and curious, picking her way through the dark woods of faith, family, sex and politics as if in some melancholy fairytale. I experienced the book like a series of cool, clear drinks, each more intoxicating than the last: I love and admire it in equal measure
Sarah Perry, author, The Essex Serpent
I really loved this strange book, which is sometimes sinister and sometimes lovely, and many other things besides
Evie Wyld, author, All the Birds, Singing
Wioletta Greg on Granta.com
Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition
Spiders from Jerusalem
Wioletta Greg
‘When the Holy Family was fleeing from Jerusalem, spiders wove such a thick web around the road that the swords of Herod’s soldiers couldn’t pierce it.’
