Probably leaves were falling, and our bad-tempered concierge raked them up in the courtyard. It’s a kind of boundary month, at least in the climate of this latitude, where seasons change slowly and autumn only gradually gives way to winter. I do remember, or at least I can picture, the golden, tender calm of October, alternating with forebodings of a long period of darkness. Her mental state, though, was not so healthy, as I learned later. My mother was twenty-five, young and healthy. Not particularly long, or particularly short, with the last contractions coming every five minutes. It’s likely that I was well positioned in my mother’s womb, because the birth was normal.

There are people who swear they remember their birth. Will she and her daughter be able to return to Riga when political change begins to stir?ĭeep Baltic has this extract from Soviet Milk… 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. The central character in the novel tries to follow her calling as a doctor. The novel, which has been translated from Latvian by Margita Gailitis, is set in Soviet-controlled Latvia between 19 and considers the effect of Soviet rule on a single individual. It’s now been picked up by the London-based publishing house Peirene Press, which specialises in short literary fiction in translation. Latvia, 20th Century”, written by well-known Latvian authors about particular periods in the country’s history, it sold over 20,000 copies in Latvia – enough to make it a best-seller in a country with a population of under two million.

Published as part of a series of novels entitled “We. Latvian author Nora Ikstena’s Soviet Milk ( Mātes piens (“Mother’s Milk”) in its original language) was a sensation on its original publication in 2015.

Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena