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' '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.
Author
Wioletta Grzegorzewska, Wioletta Greg (9 February 1974) is a Polish poet and writer, born in a small village Rzeniszów in Jurassic Highland in Poland. In 2006, she left her country and moved to the Isle of Wight. She lives in Essex. Wioletta spent ten years in Czestochowa where she organised cultural events, edited student journals, wrote articles about local literary developments. Between 1998 – 2012 she published six poetry volumes, as well as a novella Guguły, in which she's covering her childhood and the experience of growing up in Communist Poland.
