Purge »

An international sensation, Sofi Oksanen’s award-winning novel Purge is a breathtakingly suspenseful tale of two women dogged by their own shameful pasts and the dark, unspoken history that binds them.

When Aliide Truu, an older woman living alone in the Estonian countryside, finds a disheveled girl huddled in her front yard, she suppresses her misgivings and offers her shelter. Zara is a young sex-trafficking victim on the run from her captors, but a photo she carries with her soon makes it clear that her arrival at Aliide’s home is no coincidence. Survivors both, Aliide and Zara engage in a complex arithmetic of suspicion and revelation to distill each other’s motives; gradually, their stories emerge, the culmination of a tragic family drama of rivalry, lust, and loss that played out during the worst years of Estonia’s Soviet occupation.

Sofi Oksanen establishes herself as one the most important voices of her generation with this intricately woven tale, whose stakes are almost unbearably high from the first page to the last. Purge is a fiercely compelling and damning novel about the corrosive effects of shame, and of life in a time and place where to survive is to be implicated.

Publishers Weekly

Oksanen's uneven first novel to be translated into English follows one family through three generations during the Soviet occupation of the Baltics. In 1992, Aliide Truu finds a ragged and abused young woman collapsed near her rural Estonian home. The girl, Zara, is supposedly fleeing from her husband, and Aliide, an aged widow, whisks Zara inside and offers her shelter and sustenance. But when Zara shows Aliide an old picture of Aliide and her sister, Ingel, it becomes clear that Zara's choice in sanctuary wasn't coincidental. The contours of each of their lives are gradually revealed: Zara's path from being a poor Russian teenager to a fugitive sex worker (depictions of her working life are especially graphic and lean toward gratuitous) with a violent pimp on her trail; Aliide and Ingel navigating the beginning of the Soviet occupation as they settle into their adult lives in the 1940s, plagued by an oppressive regime and the tortuous demands of jealousy, deceit, and love. The translation has some rough spots, and the narrative can be heavier on history than humanity. (Apr.)