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.