ILFDublin Podcast

Sofi Oksanen has long been celebrated in her native Finland. But it was her bestselling novel Purge, a dazzling tale of two generations of Estonia women grappling with Soviet occupation and the sudden freedoms of the 1990s, that shot her to international fame. She talks to award-winning Soviet historian Anne Applebaum about When the Doves Disappeared, a novel that tells the gripping story of two cousins – principled freedom fighter Roland and slippery Edgar – whose paths cross in the 1960s, when Edgar is a communist apparatchik desperate to conceal his past.