Mother’s Milk (Soviet Milk)
by Nora Ikstena
Description
Mother’s Milk was shortlisted for the 2015 Annual Latvian Literature Award. The novel deals with the post-war period and follows the destinies of three generations of women, with the narrative focused mostly on the 1970s and 1980s. The mother, whose own mother has raised her without her real father, is a talented gynecologist who cannot accept the narrow space allotted to the individual by communist ideology. During her residency in Leningrad, she successfully – and in secret – performs an artificial insemination procedure on a young Russian woman, but the woman loses the child in a confrontation with the woman’s brutal husband, who is a war veteran. The path to science is now blocked for the talented doctor and she is reassigned to workin a small country village. She takes along her daughter, who is now deprived of the loving care of her grandparents.
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Rights Information
Sold to Japan, Germany, Sweden, Syria, Croatia, Lithuania, Georgia, Estonia, Macedonia, United Kingdom, Hungary, Italy, Ukraine
Author Biography
NORA IKSTENA (1969) was born in Riga, Latvia. In 1998, she was guest editor of The Review of Contemporary Fiction for an issue dedicated to Latvian fiction. She is the author of six novels: Celebrating Life (1998), The Virgin’s Lesson (2001), Amour Fou (2009), Besa (2012), Mother’s Milk (2015), and Adventures of Insanity (2017, in collaboration with artist Aivars Vilipsōns), along with collections of short stories and fairy tales, and books of biographical fiction, nonfiction, and essays. Her short story “Elza Kuga’s Old Age Dementia” was included in the prose anthology Best European Fiction 2011 (Dalkey Archive Press). In addition to English, Czech, German, and Italian, her work has also been translated into Lithuanian, Estonian, Swedish, Danish, Georgian, Macedonian, Croatian, Albanian, and Hungarian.
International Writers and Translators' House / Latvian Literature
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View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publication Date 2015
- Orginal LanguageLatvian
- ISBN/Identifier 9789934546013
- Pages176
- Publish StatusPublished
- Original Language TitleMātes piens
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