Swallowing Mercury, translated from the Polish by Eliza Marciniak, is a series of vignettes charting the life of one young girl from childhood to adolescence. Set in a fictional village in the Polish Jurassic Highland in the 80s, Greg weaves the political background of the country (the last decade of the communist regime) at the time into the personal narrative. I'm always a fan when an author can blend the personal and political effectively, and these stories were no different. There's also a four-page translator's note at the end which is brilliant and highly insightful!

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Most of the vignettes are no more than 10 pages, so I was expecting Greg's prose to be extremely stark and barebones. I was surprised then when her eye for miniscule detail was what stood out the most. The vignettes are mere flashes of life, but extremely vivid flashes at that. I really enjoyed the way Greg was able to build up such intense snapshots of Wiola's life in so few pages. There are also a few sombre, disturbing episodes from her adolescence, which are made all the more sobering by the brevity with which they're presented.

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But there's humour too! One of my favourite stories was where a very young Wiola is thought to be a threat to the regime after an unfortunate incident with an ink-spill during an art competition where contestants had to depict their version of Moscow. Other hints at the communist regime are similarly brief but noticeable if you know what to look for - which I did half in retrospect after reading the translator's note!

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I'd recommend it to those looking to try some Polish lit, obviously, but more to fans of short story collections, as otherwise I think some readers might find the brief vignettes a bit dissatisfying.