Allen & Unwin Norma book Fiction English Paperback 320 pages

The hair-raising mash-up of feminist X-Men, gothic fairy tale, family saga and biting social criticism that is taking Europe by storm.

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.