The narrator begins her account by telling us that she does not remember her birth in October 1969. I remember her in bed with blue lips the first time she overdosed, possibly as part of some medical experiment.’ The narrator reflects, in sadness: ‘I don’t remember Mother ever hugging me much, but I remember her needle-pricked thigh. Soviet Milk is dark, and stark, in what it depicts, particularly with regard to the central character.

She is deprived first of her professional future, then of her identity and finally of her relationship with her daughter.’ This woman, who suffers with depression, is banished to a small village in the Latvian countryside, miles away from her home in the capital, Riga. The central character in the story – a nameless woman – tries to follow her calling as a doctor. Soviet Milk ‘considers the effects of Soviet rule on a single individual. Yet just beneath the surface lies something far more positive: the story of three generations of women, and the importance of a grandmother in giving her granddaughter what her daughter is unable to promote – love, and the desire for life.’

I was particularly interested in reading this title, as I travelled around the Baltics last summer, and fell in love with Latvia.įounder of Peirene Press, Meike Ziervogel, writes: ‘At first glance this novel depicts a troubled mother-daughter relationship set in the Soviet-ruled Baltics between 19.

This novel, Ikstena’s most recent, won the 2015 Annual Latvian Literature Award for Best Prose, and has been highly lauded. Part of the Home in Exile series, this ‘literary bestseller that took the Baltics by storm’, by an author who has written over twenty books, has been translated from its original Latvian into English for the first time. One of the splendid Peirene Press’ new publications is Nora Ikstena’s Soviet Milk.

Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena