This thoughtful spy novel cum love story is set mainly in Estonia during the dying days of the Soviet Union, but also in Russia, Finland and Sweden. A group of young pro-independence dissidents devise an elaborate scheme for smuggling copies of KGB files out of the country, and their fates become entangled, through family and romantic ties, with the security services never far behind them.
Through multiple viewpoints the author evokes the curious minutiae of everyday life, offers wry observations on the period through personal experience, and asks universal questions about how interpersonal relationships are affected when caught up in momentous historical changes.
This sometimes wistful examination of how the Estonian Republic was reborn after a long and stultifying hiatus speaks also of the courage and complex chemistry of those who pushed against a regime whose then weakness could not have been known to them.
About the author
Born in 1961 in Tallinn, Estonia, Rein Raud is a novelist, journalist, translator and academic with expertise in Japanese literature and philosophy. His novels, e Brother (2008) and e Reconstruction (2012, winner of the Estonian State Prose Award), have been translated into English, and his work on the theory of culture, Meaning in Action (2016), in English. He co-authored Practices of Selfhood (2015) in English along with Zygmunt Bauman. He has translated Dante’s Vita nuova as well as books from a number of Japanese thinkers into Estonian. He teaches at universities in Estonia and Finland, and has hosted a philosophical talk show on Estonian TV.
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