Norma

From the internationally acclaimed author of Purge and When the Doves Disappeared, comes a deliciously dark family drama that is a searing portrait of both the exploitation of women's bodies and the extremes to which people will go for the sake of beauty.

When Anita Naakka jumps in front of an oncoming train, her daughter, Norma, is left alone with the secret they have spent their lives hiding: Norma has supernatural hair, sensitive to the slightest changes in her mood--and the moods of those around her--moving of its own accord, corkscrewing when danger is near. And so it is her hair that alerts her, while she talks with a strange man at her mother's funeral, that her mother may not have taken her own life. Setting out to reconstruct Anita's final months--sifting through puzzling cell phone records, bank statements, video files--Norma begins to realise that her mother knew more about her hair's powers than she let on: a sinister truth beyond Norma's imagining.



Sofi Oksanen is a Finnish-Estonian novelist and playwright. Purge was her first novel to appear in English. She has received numerous prizes for her work, including the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize, the Prix Femina, the Budapest Grand Prize, the European Book Prize, and the Nordic Council Literature Prize. She lives in Helsinki.

Owen F. Witesman is a professional literary translator with a master's in Finnish and Estonian area studies and a PhD in public affairs from Indiana University. He currently lives in Springville, Utah.



Alright, hold on tight, because this is the best novel you will read this fall



Sofi Oksanen is one of the brightest shining stars in Nordic literature. I want to devour Norma whole.



Norma is addictive, lucid, breathtakingly suspenseful, and on top of this it is stunningly observant, eerily well-researched, critical, with feminist overtones and very, very relatable



A phenomenon



Powerful, passionately wrought, emotionally shattering, extraordinary



Purge stands out. Murder, sexual violence and political history combine to place Oksanen in the front rank of crime novelists.



Finland's hottest crime writer will soon be as well-known as Stieg Larsson



Essential reading: Purge is not a book to read last thing at night.