Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be.

Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby, as she did so many of the village’s children. Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother his father told him she died in childbirth. In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh’s most exciting leap yet Through a mix of witchery, deception, murder, abuse, grand delusion, ludicrous conversations, and cringeworthy moments of bodily disgust, Moshfegh creates a world that you definitely don’t want to live in, but from which you can’t look away.” - The Atlantic “ Lapvona flips all the conventions of familial and parental relations, putting hatred where love should be or a negotiation where grief should be.

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