The Death of the Perfect Sentence - Softcover

A political thriller set mainly in Estonia during the dying days of the Soviet Union, but also in Russia, Finland and Sweden. It follows a group of young pro-independence dissidents who have an elaborate scheme for smuggling copies of KGB files out of the country, and whose fates are entangled, through family and romantic ties, with the security services who are tracking them. It describes the curious minutiae of everyday life, offers wry observations on the period through personal experience, and asks universal questions about how interpersonal relationships are affected when caught up in momentous historical changes. This sometimes wistful examination of how the Estonian Republic was reborn after a long hiatus speaks also of the courage and complex chemistry of those who pushed against a regime whose then weakness could not have been known to them.

Born in 1961 in Tallinn, Estonia, Rein Raud is a novelist, journalist, translator and academic with expertise on Japanese literature and philosophy. His novels, The Brother (2008) and The Reconstruction (2012) have been translated into English, and he himself wrote his work on the theory of culture, Meaning in Action (2016), in English. He co-authored Practices of Selfhood (2105) in English along with Zygmaunt Baumann. He has translated Japanese thinkers and Dante's Vita Nuova into Estonian. He teaches universities in Estonia and Finland and has hosted a philosophical talk show on Estonian TV.