Book
Between Shades of Gray
by Ruta Sepetys
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Lithuania, 1941. Fifteen-year-old Lina Vilkas is arrested with her mother and younger brother during the Soviet deportations and forced into a crowded railway wagon bound for Siberia. Separated from her father and stripped of the ordinary future she expected, Lina must endure hunger, forced labour and the calculated brutality of a system designed to erase both people and memory.
Lina uses drawings and coded messages to record what happens to the deportees, hoping that evidence of the family’s survival might reach her imprisoned father. Her journey through Siberian labour camps and the Arctic becomes a struggle not only to stay alive but also to protect her family, retain her artistic identity and preserve testimony about a history the Soviet authorities intend to conceal.