In Like Eating a Stone, Polish journalist Wojciech Tochman documents the aftermath of the Bosnian War through the lives of those left to reckon with its disappearances, massacres and unresolved losses. 

Brutally, Tochman follows survivors searching for missing relatives, identifying remains and attempting to establish what happened to people who vanished during the campaigns of ethnic cleansing. His reporting moves between the intimate details of individual lives and the harrowing, enormous machinery of violence that dismantled them.

It is detailed, and sensitive, to the temporal condition of surviving atrocity, in which the war has officially ended but its consequences remain suspended within everyday life. Mothers wait for news of children, families confront the bureaucratic and forensic processes of identification, and the ordinary rituals of mourning become impossible without the certainty of death. It is an unsettling account of memory, testimony and the persistent obligations of the living towards those who have disappeared. Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Portobello Books, London, 2009. First paperback edition, following the 2008 English-language hardcover. Originally published in Polish as Jakbyś kamień jadła. Softcover. Good to very good condition, with light rubbing and edge wear to covers and minor age-toning to pages.