On 8 February 2026, the Southern Hemisphere Book Club gathered to meet Estonian writer Lilli Luuk, and within minutes we were all leaning slightly closer to our screens. Not in a creepy way. In a “please keep talking, this is fascinating” way. Somewhere along the line, an hour vanished.
Lilli joined us bright and early from Estonia, cheerfully noting that she likes to wake early and write while the world is still quiet. What followed was a generous, thoughtful conversation about her novel The Night Mother (Ööema), her writing process, Estonia’s forest history, women in hiding, buried milk cans, and the peculiar ways memory behaves.
Yes, milk cans. Stay with us.
A novel born in the bog
The Night Mother reaches back to the end of the Second World War, when many Estonians fled Soviet occupation and hid in forests and bogs — some for years, even decades.
Lilli spoke about how the novel begins in the landscapes of her own childhood: the bogs of Järvamaa and Läänemaa. As a child, trudging through cranberry marshes may have felt mildly torturous. As a writer, she realised those same wetlands had quietly shaped her.
Estonian bogs, she reminded us, are not just scenic postcard material. Historically, they were refuge. Shelter. Survival.
Several readers confessed that the novel’s opening felt strangely homely — even cosy — despite the underlying tension. Which, if you think about it, is peak Estonian energy: beauty, silence, existential unease.
The forest brothers… and the forest sisters
Much has been written about the metsavennad (forest brothers). Less so about the metsaõed — the women who hid, supported, endured and survived in parallel.
Lilli spoke powerfully about this imbalance. Women were not initially mobilised. But they became targets quickly — pressured, interrogated, used as leverage. Many lived in forests themselves. Their reasons varied. Their stories are still emerging. As she researched, Lilli discovered how little systematic study had been done on these women. Writing the novel became a way of asking: what did survival look like for them?
And then there were the details. Lilli showed us photographs of milk cans buried underground to protect belongings from damp and rodents. Photographs of bunker excavations. Objects preserved in metal containers — spectacles, razors, even playing cards — because human dignity does not pause simply because history has gone feral.
It was not misery theatre, she reminded us. People were young. They tried to be happy. Even in hiding.
History breathes and whispers
One of the most fascinating parts of the evening was Lilli describing her writing process. Writing historical fiction, she said, feels a little like being a historian — except with more imagination and more responsibility. You read. You listen. And crucially, you notice what is not said. Sometimes a memory ends abruptly. A pause hangs in the air. That silence can be as revealing as any archive document.
Lilli visits real locations — sits on remnants of bunker walls, walks through forests, studies old photographs — trying to sense how the landscape might have felt decades ago. Fieldwork, but make it literary.
Her writing routine? Early mornings. Word-count discipline for novels (10,000 characters a day when deep in a project). Music to match the era — Nancy, Artur Rinne, whatever helps the mood settle. And notebooks everywhere.
At one point Lilli described the sensation that the characters themselves lead her. “Sometimes it feels like I’m walking behind them,” she said, “rather than inventing them”. (We collectively agreed that this is both poetic and mildly mystical — and we loved it.)
Black-and-white childhood, colour at a distance
The novel doesn’t stay in wartime. It moves into 1984 — into a closed Soviet society where fragments of beauty flicker through television screens. Figure skating. Music. Glittering costumes glimpsed in black and white.
Lilli spoke about the shock of realising, as a child, that somewhere else the world was bright and dazzling — while your own felt muted. She even wove in subtle references to Estonian singer Artur Rinne, whose life reflected the ruptures of his generation.
And then, as the book moves toward the late 1980s and early 1990s, everything collides: forest survivors, Soviet functionaries, returnees from exile, village reunions. History refuses to stay politely in the past.
Perhaps the most moving part of the conversation was when Lilli spoke about responsibility. You can never fully reconstruct history. You cannot see into people’s thoughts. But you must try to stay close to truth. You cannot be careless. She described elderly readers calling her to say, quietly, “Yes. It was like that.” Those calls matter.
Writing the novel took three years — though in truth, she admitted, it began decades earlier in family albums and half-heard stories.
The story continues
Lilli has three books published so far, with two more arriving this year:
- A historical short story collection due in late Estonian spring/early summer.
- A contemporary short story collection toward the end of the year — with a little more humour woven in.
By the end of the session, it felt less like a book club and more like a shared excavation — of forests, of silence, of inherited memory. Books like The Night Mother remind us that history is not abstract. It lives in villages, in bogs, in family stories told — or not told — at kitchen tables. And in the end, what maybe matters most is that we remember. And the story continues.
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Lõunapoolkera Lugemisklubi welcomes Lilli Luuk on Zoom | HEIA
Read about Lilli Luuk here
