Soviet Milk

A Latvian doctor gives birth under Soviet occupation and finds she cannot breastfeed her daughter — not physically but psychologically, the regime having colonized even that. The novel moves between mother and daughter across three generations, each carrying what the other couldn't. Ikstena wrote this as a dispatch from inside what Soviet occupation did to the female body and the female mind — not the gulag, not the interrogation room, but the kitchen, the hospital, the nursing chair. The most intimate Baltic dispatch on this shelf and one of the most quietly devastating novels written anywhere in the last decade.