Dog Park

Finnish author Sofi Oksanen is known for her hard-hitting prose and for tackling tough subjects. In Dog Park, she focuses on the global fertility market that often operates under the radar, exploiting many young women. For them, the consequences of the surrogacy business are both physical and emotional.

Her latest story moves dramatically between modern-day Finland and Ukraine in the early days of its independence from the Soviet Union, where the Donbas region is still in the throes of a war and resourceful, ruthless gangsters rule and fight, while everyone else does their best to survive and eke out some kind of existence.

Reading this dark, explosive novel against the tragic backdrop of Russia’s invasion and bombing of modern Ukraine made the experience particularly unsettling and poignant.

In 2006, Olenka returns home from a stint in Paris where she tried but failed to start a modelling career. Scarred by the experience of being treated as nothing more than a commodity, she’s now looking for any work she can get to support her close family who rely on poppy plants to make low-grade heroin which is then sold to the local mafia. Her father died a horrible death some time ago when his entrepreneurial efforts infuriated one of the biggest gangsters in the area. She comes across a local company making waves globally and becomes a powerful player in the egg donation and surrogacy business, but the company’s methods are often dubious; young girls are desperate to earn a living while hoping for better for themselves. But their choices are limited and the money they make barely enables them to survive.

Corruption, lawlessness, exploitation, work in illegal coal mines and political instability all tower over women’s health and prospects.    
Ten years later, Olenka is sitting on a bench by a dog park in Helsinki watching a family of four playing. When a woman sits down next to her, she realises that it’s her old friend Daria, whose life she ruined and who she hasn’t seen since her dramatic escape from Ukraine. For a moment, there is a fragile connection between them that’s both heart-breaking and terrifying, especially as emotions are running wild and Olenka knows that her peaceful days might be coming to an end. Her disappearance to the safety of Finland will not save her from accusations of burning all bridges back home and killing a wealthy man. Someone has discovered where she’s been hiding after six years of anonymity, possibly her former lover, a hitman working for the king of Ukraine’s criminal underworld.

Oksanen creates an intricate and vivid picture of lives entangled in legal and criminal worlds, impossible to separate as everyone struggles to adjust to the new systems and structures. Now violence is the only common currency. As Oksanen delivers a passionate analysis of society, comparing attitudes from western and eastern Europe, she also takes the reader on an unsettling and dramatic journey of love and death, family and betrayal, and revenge that will change everything. Dog Park is difficult and unsettling, and a necessary book for our times.