'Nora Ikstena’s fiction opens up new paths not only for Latvian literature in English translation but for English literature itself. 'Nora Ikstena is proving that Latvia is speaking in a bold and original voice.' Rosie Goldsmith, broadcaster and reviewer Yet just beneath the surface lies something far more positive: the story of three generations of women, and the importance of a grandmother giving her granddaughter what her daughter is unable to provide - love, and the desire for life.

Will she and her daughter be able to return to Riga when political change begins to stir?Īt first glance this novel depicts a troubled mother-daughter relationship set in the the Soviet-ruled Baltics between 1969 and 1989.

Banished to a village in the Latvian countryside, her sense of isolation increases. She is deprived first of her professional future, then of her identity and finally of her relationship with her daughter. Set in Latvia during the 1980s, the last decade of the Soviet rule, the. Two additional titles, And the Wind Sees All by Icelandic author Gumundur Andri Thorsson and the Lithuanian novel Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkeviiut will be released later this year. They tell their story in a simple language that. The central character in the story tries to follow her calling as a doctor. Soviet Milk is the first in Peirene’s 2018-series ‘Home in Exile’. Set in Soviet-occupied Latvia, we encounter the two memorable voices of a nameless mother and her daughter. Our guest of honour is award-winning Latvian author, Nora Ikstena, whose 2015 novel Mtes piens (published by Peirene Press in the UK as Soviet Milk) is about exactly this: three generations of Latvian women connected by mothers’ milk. This novel considers the effects of Soviet rule on a single individual. The book Soviet Milk has been licensed for 15 foreign languages, among them translations in Italian and German. The literary bestseller that took the Baltics by storm now published for the first time in English.

Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena