We’re thrilled to announce that our August Book Club selection is Wioletta Greg’s Swallowing Mercury!
In this celebrated debut from the prize-winning poet, Wiola looks back on her youth in a close-knit, agricultural community in 1980s Poland. Her memories are precise, intense, distinctive, sensual: a playfulness and whimsy rise up in the gossip of the village women, rumored visits from the Pope, and the locked room in the dressmaker’s house, while political unrest and predatory men cast shadows across this bright portrait. Rowan Hisayo Buchanon, author of Harmless Like You, says of the novel:
Swallowing Mercury shows how the overwhelming forces of beauty, politics, mortality, violence, and hope can animate even the smallest moments of life.
Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and translated by Eliza Marciniak, Swallowing Mercury is forthcoming from Transit Books in September. But you can read it with us in August, and participate in our live online discussion with Wioletta Greg! Just subscribe to The Rumpus Book Club by August 20!
