Purge by Sofi Oksanen (2008)
Aliide finds a girl right outside her door in a small village in Estonia. The girl doesn’t have many clothes on and is missing one shoe. What is she doing there? Could she be a decoy for gangs trying to rob her house?
The girl is Zara, from Vladivostok.. She has escaped from the men who forced her to sell sex in Berlin. And there is a reason why she is outside Aliide’s door, they are related. Aliide remembers what happened in her village during World War II, when she was secretly in love with her sister’s husband who were in the Estonian resistance army , but married a high ranked Communist party member in Estonia.
I’m sort of disappointed with this book. Every word of it is great, but there are so many gaps. There are two main questions I have after reading it; how did Zara get to Berlin from Vladivostok? And Aliide, what did you do?
