In 1993, Sigrid Rausing, the owner of publishers Granta, spent a year living in the village of Purksi in Estonia. Purksi was the site of the Lenin Collective Farm, a dilapidated reminder of the total control the USSR had enjoyed over the area just two years previously. This book charts her experiences on the former collective farm, the trials of the people she met in a nation which had enjoyed just nineteen years of independence in four centuries and the beauty and isolation of the forests and rocky coastline that marked the border with the West and was off limits during the Soviet period.
We are delighted to welcome back best-selling historian and novelist Simon Sebag Montefiore to chat to Sigrid about her book.
This talk takes place at Daunt Books, Marylebone High Street. Tickets cost £8.00, and are available from the Marylebone shop in person, via telephone (020 7224 2295), or online here.
