Norfolk Library Book Group with Mark Scarbrough: Sofi Oksanen, PURGE (2008)

Continuing his theme of books by Finnish authors, Mark has selected Purge (2008) by Sofi Oksanen for the next meeting of the Book Group. 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.

If you are new to the Book Group and would like to participate, please email Mark at markwrites@bruceandmark.com, and he will email you a formal invitation link to the online discussion group. The group meets via Zoom on select Thursdays 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. or 7:30 – 9:00 p.m.