What Now, Mr Wolf?
€12.99
Ryna comes home from abroad to the wake of her granny Darafeya in Nauhalnaye, a village in the drained marshlands near Lipen, in a remote corner of Belarus. That night as Ryna sits alone with the coffin, Darafeya, who lived to be a hundred, tells one last story. She and her grandmother, one-eyed Maryanka, known as the ‘whisperers’, managed to survive several brutal regimes, feared and respected by their neighbours for their powers of healing and witchcraft.
Caustic; harrowing, yet leavened with black humour, What Now, Mr Wolf? offers an unforgettable oral testimony of the dark days of recent European history. Ryna, prisoner of her grandmother Darafeya’s memories of relentless violence, tries to make her peace with them and remake a life for herself in this troubled place.
Eva Vezhnavets
Eva Vezhnavets (Eva Viežnaviec) was born in 1972 in Zahalle, a village south of Minsk. Journalist, translator and writer, she was compelled to leave Belarus and now works at the Katyń Museum in Warsaw, Poland. Historical sections of What Now, Mr Wolf? are based on family stories as well as eyewitness reports and materials from archives and the local press. First published in Minsk in 2020 and reissued in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2024 by Pflaumbaum, the publishing house founded by Svetlana Alexievich, 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, What Now, Mr Wolf? was awarded the highest prize for prose in Belarus in 2021.
Author portrait © Zmicer Waynowski