Purge

by Sofi Oksanen

Translated from the original Finnish by Lola Rogers

Deep in an Estonian forest, two women, one young, one old, are hiding.
Zara is a prostitute and a murderer, on the run from brutal captors – men who know how to punish a woman. Aliide offers refuge but not safety: she has her own criminal secrets – traitorous crimes of passion and revenge committed long ago, during the country’s brutal Soviet years.
Both women have survived lives of abuse. But this time their survival depends on revealing the one thing history has taught them to keep safely hidden: the truth.
A haunting, intimate and gripping story of suspicion, betrayal and retribution against a backdrop of Soviet oppression and European war.

(From Publisher).

Sofi Oksanen was born in Finland and a former graduate of the Finnish Theatre Academy. She is the author of three novels. Purge is her first novel to be published in English translation. She lives in Helsinki.

A breathtaking tale of two women, forced to confront their own traumatic pasts, that mingles both with the personal history of their families and the political history of Estonia.

Gripping look at what people do to survive, and what they do for love - framed by Estonian history and painful memories.

A brilliantly written, dark and heartbreaking, but also optimistic novel about power and loss, about Estonia since World War 2, and two women with dark secrets. Purge is a masterpiece.

A very moving novel with historical references on Estonia's recent history, with literary values and a well-knit plot through the stories of two memorable women's characters.

Purge captures both the tragic consequences of one of Europe's biggest conflicts and the universal horrors that war inflicts on women.

Purge is a story mostly about women, about their feminine strength and their feminine tragedies. It is a story about a toxic love, jealousy, social condemnation and lack of fulfilment. It is a story of people entangled in history. The human dramas described in the novel, with the difficult history of 20th century Estonia in the background, are universal in nature.

The history of Estonia represented by two women: two generations, two political systems, violence and the struggle to survive. Narrated through a polyphonic choir of individual voices, suspenseful and dramatic.