Voracious
“Life and death are beautifully balanced in Lebda’s lyrical novel.” —Olga Tokarczuk
“A visionary account of the lacework of interrelationships between people and the earth. It has a hallucinatory quality – passionate, disturbing, memorable – like a dream sent to us by a druid. Antonia Lloyd-Jones has rendered this dream in a breathtaking English translation that seethes and flickers.” —Sasha Dugdale
“Voracious is gorgeous, vivid, timeless, a novel about a small place and a small family as a microcosm of the human family and the whole world at this particular moment in time.” —Sara Baume
“A dark, gorgeous and haunting book about bodies, attention and care” —Sarah Moss
Voracious follows a year in the life of a young woman caring for her dying grandmother in the company of her grandfather, her friend, and plants and animals – from flies to cats, ants to dogs. Meanwhile their village in the Beskid mountains, in southern Poland, which echoes with noises from the nearby slaughterhouse, is threatened by a landslide. Małgorzata Lebda guides us through the countryside, changing seasons, wildlife, illness, death, and love. Everything is at once fragile and full of life, animate and inanimate.