Voracious follows a year in the life of a young woman caring for her dying grandmother in the company of her grandfather, her friend, and animals. Set in a small village which echoes with noises from a nearby slaughterhouse, the residents are eternally threatened by a landslide. While the grandfather renovates a house for his wife, the women care for one another, for the plants, and for the animals.

Małgorzata Lebda guides us through the countryside, changing seasons, through wildlife, illness, death, and love. Everything is at once fragile and full of life, animate and inanimate. Full of profound emotional truths, this book signals the arrival of a new international talent.

“Life and death are beautifully balanced in Lebda’s lyrical novel.” Olga Tokarczuk (2018 Nobel Prize in Literature)

“Voracious is a visionary account of the lacework of interrelationships between people and the earth. It has a hallucinatory quality – passionate, disturbing, memorable – like a dream sent to us by a druid. Antonia Lloyd-Jones has rendered this dream in a breathtaking English translation that seethes and flickers like the scenes it depicts.” Sasha Dugdale

“Voracious is gorgeous, vivid, timeless, a novel about a small place and a small family as a microcosm of the human family and the whole world at this particular moment in time.” Sara Baume

“A dark, gorgeous and haunting book about bodies, attention and care.” Sarah Moss

“Voracious is a miraculous work, at the same time brutal and delicate, its surprises enfolded in the quotidian and in the sublime.” Lisa McInerney

“A truly gorgeous book, rootedly visceral, full of the most breathtaking emotive bursts and teeming within its cadences of small but vital astonishments. There's an important story here, nothing less than the exploration of life and death and just how as one we all are with the natural world, but, inevitably, it's the language (rendered here in the most masterful translation) that elevates Voracious to a state of high art: wild, melodic, sacred, compulsive, gripping with its imagery at the most sensory level, this is a novel to be read and felt and savoured, then read again. Remarkable.” Billy O’Callaghan

“This controlled, spare and often exquisite novel is concerned with the seasons, the countryside, and humans coexisting with the darker aspects of themselves and of nature. … All of death and life is in Lebda’s short work, bloody, beautiful and intermingling. A quiet joy of a book.” Catherine Taylor, Irish Times

 “Lebda has a rare and fabulous sense of language, of the meaning of words, a way of anchoring  and transforming them.” Gazeta Wyborcza

“Lebda’s prose is exceptional - she has successfully created a microcosmos in which everything is interconnected, dying and full of life at the same time.” Polityka

"Małgorzata Lebda guides us through the countryside, changing seasons, wildlife, illness, death, and love. Everything is at once fragile and full of life, animate and inanimate." Dublin Literary Award

"This intense and enchanting book reads very much like a dream or a fairytale... Though it doesn’t follow a traditional narrative arc, the book is busy and alive, proceeding forward through the seasons in flashes of slender, disconnected scenes that explore ideas and questions around illness and grief, dying and living." Lacey Dunham, Necessary Fiction

"This village setting is situated on the edge of the last genuinely wild woods in Europe, where wolves roam freely and the natural world still holds sway over those who live within it. This is a book that draws you into that world. I was reminded of the place of the world of Drive Your Plough over the Bones of the Dead by Tokarczuk" Winstonsdad’s Blog

"Lebda's sparse, sensory novel combines sensitivity to nature, of which humans are a part, with linguistic mastery. The author creates a multi-layered story about the power of the elements, voraciousness for life, and a private cosmos at the moment of trial." Granice

"Lebda's debut prose is outstanding primarily because no pairs of oppositions can be outlined in it, no clearly straight lines or their intersections. This is a world that undulates, flows, slips away from sight and hand" Paulina Małochleb, Książki na ostro

"The words sing. The writing has rhythm. It’s both sensual and lyrical. A debut novel steeped in poetry." Quand les livres nous parlent

"This book felt like a song, an extension of its beautiful, shimmering cover. A captivating discovery." Mémo Emoi

Grandma can’t resist any living thing. She’d take everything that’s alive into the west room, she’d invite it in. Her wish is for living things to be there before her eyes, to be moving about, to make scratching and buzzing noises.

Let it strut around, she says.

Let it flutter, she says.

Let it be, she says.

Grandma has adored living things for ever, that’s to say for as long as I can remember. I think one could track the generations of everything that has multiplied here, in the western part of the house. And if one were to ask the last of these generations, the living one, where they’re from, then if they could talk, they’d be sure to say they were from the cool room of the human, the humaness, Róża.

Her wish, I think, is for living things to occupy her mind, especially now, to give rise to responsibilities, to divert her attention from the illness.

Grandma studies living things with curiosity. This passion, as I call it – this weakness, as Grandpa calls it – has rendered her useless so many times.

It was a nightmare, taking Ró(a to the field, Grandpa begins, reminding me at the same time of my childhood.

The moment Grandma saw a grasshopper in the scythed wheat, he says, she’d drop the work she was doing and pick it up. She’d cup her hands around the insect’s body to construct a sealed home for it and carry it to the boundary strip. And there she’d talk to that living thing and set it down on a wild strawberry leaf, a wild garlic leaf, or some tiny yellow pimpernel leaves. And chase it away into the forest. Shoo, she’d cry after the insect, anything to keep it far from the harvest blades.

Then I’d follow her onto the boundary strip, watchfully, as if suspecting a holy rite was happening there. Grandma herself was a saint to me. In those days I’d give her all sorts of names. Like:

Saint Grandma Róża talking to insects.

Saint Grandma Róża the tender.

Saint Grandma Róża the just.

Saint Grandma Róża the compassionate.

Saint Grandma Róża the merciful.

Saint Grandma Róża who is.

For fuck’s sake, Róża, Grandpa would shout, and Grandma would return to the field to go on sowing confusion and interrupting the work of human muscles and heated-up machines. For at once a new living thing would find its way into her hands.

Then, as Grandma walked towards the forest again, the rebellion in her would start its ritual too. She’d be defying Grandpa, his imprecations and curses. At such moments two forces would go head to head, two things that were sacred: the sanctity of work, and the sanctity of a tiny life. And as I can see now, years on, Grandma was also holding back time and controlling it in her own way.

“Voracious  is a gorgeously written book – the quality of the writing brings embroidery to mind – and feels more expansive than its short length. The darkness is undercut by moments of exquisite beauty, and the constant presence of the natural world within its pages often feels magical. Małgorzata handles decay, death and grief with exquisite care and an unflinching eye. In the end, the result feels both distinctively Polish and inarguably universal.” Maria Xilouri, Metaixmio

“Voracious by Małgorzata Lebda is a profound and lyrical story of love, illness, and intergenerational healing. There is much to love in this novel: the wise, tender interactions between the women; the pervasive and all-powerful natural world; and the narrator’s unerring precision. I read it in Polish, my native language, and recognised immediately Lebda's rare and masterful control over the language. This is a very special novel - universal yet intimate - that will stick with you. I am very proud that Voracious, in Antonia Lloyd-Jones' translation, will be one of the launch titles for Linden Editions.” Tasja Dorkofikis, Linden Editions, UK

“I had a hunch. From the moment it came into my hands, intuitively I felt that Voracious was an important book, something that I definitely confirmed by reading the first pages. Małgorzata Lebda has a very strong and delightful voice, a sense for structure, both in terms of the narrative and the use of the language, with words. In addition to it, the topics are profoundly appealing to me as well as her approach. Lebda really has the ability to evoke a whole world, an atmosphere, with apparent simplicity. It's an absolute pleasure to include it in our catalogue.” Fani Manresa, Temporal Casa Editorial, Spain

“I got acquainted with Małgorzata Lebda's poetry a few years ago, thanks to Biserka Rajčić's translation, which resulted in Treći Trg publishing her selected poems in Serbian in 2017. Małgorzata's poetic world and her language explore both everyday life and existential crises, with an important emphasis on the nature which surrounds us. I got interested in publishing her first novel especially because its foundation is Małgorzata's poetic language, which gained more complex form and a new space.” Dejan Matić, Treći Trg, Serbia

“Against a backdrop of a scorching hot summer Voracious (Łakome) is a universal novel about love, decay and in the end salvation. With her unique poetic language Malgorzata Lebda describes the Polish countryside and its inhabitants in both an intimate and remarkably recognisable way. Malgorzata Lebda is a voracious new European voice that fits perfectly in the list of Koppernik authors.” Chris de Jong, Koppernik Uitgever

“Małgorzata Lebda’s Voracious represents new, touching, exciting Polish prose which the Finnish audience has not yet had the chance to experience. Her poetic and unique voice is like a fresh breeze that carries a message of the power of language.” Venla Saalo, Särötär