Purge

by SofiOksanen (Author), Lola Rogers (Translator), Lola Rogers (Translator), Sofi Oksanen (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2011

  $3.25

  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.

• New

  Paperback
  2010

  $18.22

  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.