A devastating novel about daughters, mothers, alcoholism, care and memory.

Almost heartbreakingly, it reads almost like someone sorting through the debris field of a childhood in real time, trying to hold humour and horror in the same hand without either cancelling the other out.

Marcinów is a psychologist as well as a writer, and you can feel that pressure throughout the book. You see it in the way behaviour is observed microscopically. The emotional logic here is brutally precise. A line like “When I propped her up, she fell more frequently. As if she felt safer” contains an entire architecture of dependency and familial adaptation inside it. The translation by Maggie Zebracka is excellent too: clean, cold where needed, but capable of sudden lyric compression.

This Heloise Press edition is from 2024, translated from the Polish. Softcover in very good condition with only light handling wear.