“When I hit you, Lenin cries”, is what our author’s revolutionary husband tells her after every unnerving beating over the course of their short four month love marriage. Seduced by poetry and politics our young narrator falls for a university professor and accepts his hand in marriage, she moves for him to a new home where she doesn’t speak the language. It starts slowly of course, answering phone calls on her behalf, asking for her Facebook password but escalates into extreme physical and sexual abuse. 

This is not an easy book, our protagonist experiences and survives extreme violence and social isolation at her husband’s hands. There are moments where the brutalities are too much so prepare yourself. That being said, this is many women’s reality and ignoring it doesn’t make it go away, #domesticviolence takes the life of millions of people, world wide. In fact, two women are killed in the UK every week by a former or current partner.