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.

索菲·奥克萨宁（Sofi Oksanen），1977年出生于芬兰，母亲是爱沙尼亚裔，父亲是芬兰人。2003年出版第一部小说《斯大林的乳牛》（Stalin’s Cows），内容充满争议，受到各界讨论。两年后，出版第二部小说《宝贝雅内》（Baby Jane）。2007年，剧本《清洗》（Puhdistus）登上芬兰国家戏剧院，成为芬兰国家戏剧院的常备剧目。2008年，同名小说《清洗》出版，一炮而红，迅速成为芬兰头号畅销书，包揽了芬兰最重要的两个文学大奖——芬兰国家文学奖和鲁内贝格奖，从而创纪录地成为第一部同时获得这两项大奖的作品。2010年，此书又获得了北欧地区的最高文学奖——北欧理事会文学奖，以及法国的费米娜外国小说奖，2013年，更是荣获素有“小诺奖”之称的瑞典学院北欧文学奖——奥克萨宁成为该奖有史以来最年轻的获奖者，也是第一位芬兰女得主。《清洗》在全世界售出44国版权，被译成30多种语言，热潮从北欧延烧至欧洲大陆，不仅获得欧洲书奖和法国费米娜奖的肯定，更创下法国法雅客（FNAC）小说奖的先例，成为首部非法文原创的得奖作品。2012年，《清洗》被改编成电影及歌剧。芬兰《首都报》赞誉此书“宏伟、令人颤栗，是每个人都梦寐以求想阅读、书写，并出版的小说”。

2009年，索菲·奥克萨宁被爱沙尼亚《信使报》选为“年度风云人物”。