Soviet Milk

Soviet-occupied Latvia across two decades: a gifted Riga doctor is banished to run a rural clinic, and her daughter grows up between the flat dairy country of the countryside and the grey capital, as the occupation grinds on toward the independence that arrives with the map's final years. The map runs from Riga's Old Town out east and south into the farmland where the mother is exiled.

The daughter

Riga, the capital

Riga, 1969

The daughter is born into a Riga family at the start of the 1970s, under Soviet rule. The capital is where the grandmother keeps a household and where the mother trained as a doctor, and it is the pole the daughter keeps returning to across the years the book covers.

Opening chapters

explicit The novel is anchored in Riga, the author's own city and the family's home before the mother's exile; this marks the centre of the Latvian capital.

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