What Now, Mr Wolf?

A twentieth-century rural Belarusian tale told by the women 'whisperers' of Nauhalnaye, feared by their neighbours for their powers of healing and witchcraft who survived successive, brutal regimes.

Ryna comes home from abroad to the wake of her granny Darafeya in Nauhalnaye, a village in the drained marshlands near Lipen, in a remote corner of Belarus. That night as Ryna sits alone with the coffin, Darafeya, who lived to be a hundred, tells one last story. She and her grandmother, one-eyed Maryanka, known as the ''whisperers'', managed to survive several brutal regimes, feared and respected by their neighbours for their powers of healing and witchcraft. Caustic; harrowing, yet leavened with black humour, What Now, Mr Wolf? offers an unforgettable oral testimony of the dark days of recent European history. Ryna, prisoner of her grandmother Darafeya''s memories of relentless violence, tries to make her peace with them and remake a life for herself in this troubled place. Granny could remember who was killed or simply died and where, in what part of the forest and how they were found... The old girl had lived through two wars and nine different powers-that-be, and she didn''t spare her granddaughter any of her stories.