Purge by Sofi Oksanen

Aliide Truu, the warped murderess and tragic victim at the center of Sofi Oksansen’s astoundingly ambitious novel Purge, is an elderly woman when we meet her in the opening chapter. Living alone in the Estonian countryside in 1992, she has recently witnessed her nation’s liberation from Soviet rule, and is dealing with the challenges of life in a “dying village,” where everyone is moving away, no one comes to visit, and the day is interrupted only by hooligans throwing stones at the window. But a further repercussion of the USSR’s dramatic collapse—the burgeoning power of the Russian Mafia and its deadly facilitation of sex trafficking—is about to come crashing on her doorstep. Read the rest @ Words Without Borders.