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·奧剋薩寜（Sofi Oksanen），1977年齣生於芬蘭，母親是愛沙尼亞裔，父親是芬蘭人。2003年齣版第一部小說《斯大林的乳牛》（Stalin’s Cows），內容充滿爭議，受到各界討論。兩年後，齣版第二部小說《寶貝雅內》（Baby Jane）。2007年，劇本《清洗》（Puhdistus）登上芬蘭國傢戲劇院，成為芬蘭國傢戲劇院的常備劇目。2008年，同名小說《清洗》齣版，一炮而紅，迅速成為芬蘭頭號暢銷書，包攬瞭芬蘭最重要的兩個文學大奬——芬蘭國傢文學奬和魯內貝格奬，從而創紀錄地成為第一部同時獲得這兩項大奬的作品。2010年，此書又獲得瞭北歐地區的最高文學奬——北歐理事會文學奬，以及法國的費米娜外國小說奬，2013年，更是榮獲素有“小諾奬”之稱的瑞典學院北歐文學奬——奧剋薩寜成為該奬有史以來最年輕的獲奬者，也是第一位芬蘭女得主。《清洗》在全世界售齣44國版權，被譯成30多種語言，熱潮從北歐延燒至歐洲大陸，不僅獲得歐洲書奬和法國費米娜奬的肯定，更創下法國法雅客（FNAC）小說奬的先例，成為首部非法文原創的得奬作品。2012年，《清洗》被改編成電影及歌劇。芬蘭《首都報》贊譽此書“宏偉、令人顫栗，是每個人都夢寐以求想閱讀、書寫，並齣版的小說”。

2009年，索菲·奧剋薩寜被愛沙尼亞《信使報》選為“年度風雲人物”。