Article 58

Book I · Free ebook

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Rīga, 1940.

Seventeen-year-old Kārlis Pērkons is sledding with friends when the NKVD stops them for violating Article 58 of the Russian Criminal Code: illegal assembly, singing folk songs, criticizing the regime. The boys scatter — all but one, who is taken to the Corner House. Everyone in Rīga knows the Corner House. Nobody uses its name. You enter. You don't come out.

In a city where a pin through Stalin's photograph is a death sentence, where your neighbor may be your informer, and where a Soviet "apprentice" has moved into your bedroom and taken over your father's business, Kārlis makes his first truly independent decision: he  fights back — the only way a seventeen-year-old can.