Purge

Rural Estonia, early 1990s: the Soviet era is over, land is being handed back, and Aliide Truu, old and wary, lives alone on her farm. One morning a girl lies unconscious in her garden. Zara, barely twenty, claims to be running from a brutal husband; in fact she has broken free of the pimps who lured her from Vladivostok to Berlin. Taking her in reopens what Aliide has buried: her obsessive love in the 1940s for Hans, the anti-communist who married her sister Ingel, and the betrayals that followed under occupation. Shifting between decades, the novel shows two women exploited by men a generation apart, and a country still living with what it kept silent.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

380 pages in the original

Genres

Historical, Family, Politics (assigned by AI)

Set in

Estonia, 1940s–1990s

First published

2008 by WSOY

Author's age

31 when first published

ISBN

9789510339732 (original)

9780802170774 (Black Cat, United States)

9781848872110 (Atlantic Books, United Kingdom)

9781848872134 (Atlantic Books, United Kingdom)

9781786495419 (Atlantic Books, United Kingdom)

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Wikidata