Our selection of 5 exciting foreign novels

4. “Vorace”, by Malgorzata Lebda

Ed. Black on White, 272 p.; €23.

Grandma loves life, everything alive, including spiders and moths. Which doesn’t stop her from enjoying her husband’s pigeon broth. Very ill, she traces a honey route in her house for the ants, asks to have poems read to her, walks along the edge of the forest.

Grandfather repairs and arranges the house. Their granddaughter, a computer coder who has set up her bedroom in the attic, and her friend Ann, accompany them in their old age.

In this mountainous region of the Beskids, in the south of Poland, there is also a slaughterhouse, foxes, wind, snow, and a particular attention to the present moment, to gentleness.

This first novel by a researcher, photographer and poet, hailed in Poland as “the literary discovery of the year”, is a little gem celebrating the fragility of existence.

M.F.

Our opinion: PPP