The latest addition to my website is Wioletta Greg‘s Guguły (Swallowing Mercury). This is a delightful and poetical tale of a girl growing up in rural Poland, a village called Hektary, during the 1970s and 1980s. Despite the changes taking place in Poland at that time, these seem to have only minimal impact on Hektary. We follow the story of Wiola, a wilful and independent-minded girl for whom things often go wrong but she seems to generally take it in her stride, going her own way. Greg is poet and she writes the story with a poet’s eye, observing the details of the natural life of the village but also the customs and behaviour of the people, religious and yet superstitious, though living under a communist regime. We end as Wiola is becoming a woman and Poland is becoming free