Our heroine Zuleikha lives a harsh life -- as a peasant woman living with a brutal, unloving husband and mother-in-law, as a Tartar forced into Stalin’s de-kulakization program in the 1930s, and as a struggling survivor exiled in bleakest Siberia. Intense and heavy, Yakhina's novel offers a great glimpse into the atrocities of the Soviet Gulag system.