Beautiful and rightfully bleak. 4/5 stars.
The blurb: Leningrad, September 1941. Hitler orders the German forces to surround the city at the start of the most dangerous, desperate winter in its history. For two pairs of lovers – Anna and Andrei, Anna’s novelist father and banned actress Marina – the siege becomes a battle for survival. They will soon discover what it is like to be so hungry you boil shoe leather to make soup, so cold you burn furniture and books. But this is not just a struggle to exist, it is also a fight to keep the spark of hope alive…
The Siege is a brilliantly imagined novel of war and the wounds it inflicts on ordinary people’s lives, and a profoundly moving celebration of love, life and survival.
My take:
I got a copy of this from the library. It sat on the table and stared at me for four weeks. I couldn’t bring myself to progress past the opening page on which there is a reproduction of the order from Nazi High Command for Leningrad (St Petersburg) to be wiped off the face of the earth. I had a feeling reading this one would take strength, and I was right.
Obviously, any book which attempts to faithfully recreate an insider’s experience of the siege of Leningrad isn’t going to be sunshine and rainbows. But just how traumatic reading this book is, is testament to the tremendous skill of the writer. The descriptions of piercing cold and gnawing hunger are so powerful you find yourself turning the heating up and going in search of biscuits.
Dunmore’s research must have been painstaking to recreate the Leningrad of the time so effectively. And I imagine reading first-hand survivor accounts of the conditions inside the city couldn’t have been easy.
The author also deserves praise for bringing such an important story to my attention because, apart from some vague recollections of hearing it mentioned, it’s part of WWII history which managed to slip past me. I don’t think we covered this in school, even though 1.5 million people died in Leningrad in the winter of 1941.
Overall: powerful and moving, with brilliant descriptions and complex characters. Although, as you’d expect, this is also a bleak read only to be approached if you think you can stomach it.
Claire Huston / Art and Soul
Excellent book – very atmospheric of the grim times – I remember feeling really cold as I read it!
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Cold and hungry. I wondered if the author had tried starving herself to be able to describe it so well!
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Maybe researched some first hand accounts …?
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Wow I would love to read this book- yeah, I had the same problem at school, with Leningrad just being a footnote- I have been looking for a good book (fiction or non-fiction) on it for a while- this one sounds like just the ticket!
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This would be perfect. From what I could find out (i.e. read on Wikipedia), she’s got the facts dead on. I shiver just thinking about it – and not just because of the cold.
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This book sounds like it would be a devastating read. I am always interested in WWII history, but this one sounds like it might be too heartbreaking. Great review!
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It is just so sad. I know it’s sold as a “triumph of the human spirit” story, but I honestly don’t see how you can take anything happy away from it. That said, I’m glad I read it so I know more about the siege because I can’t believe how little I knew about it before.
And thank you! 🙂
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Black Book is a very good movie on Netflix about the Holocaust. It is often painful at times to see but so important to keep this history alive, so the same mistake is not made again.
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Absolutely. Books and films about these events should be difficult to read/watch, and are so important so we don’t forget.
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Yes, I have heard of some school which don’t teach about the Holocaust. I have also taught some students whose knowledge of this time period was very surprising.
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You are right…beautiful and bleak, and it inspired me to look up more about it before we visited St Petersburg. We specifically went to a museum about the siege and could picture the layout of the city and river, thanks to this compelling powerful story.
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It’s a story I knew very little about before, and I find it shocking it gets glossed over in the history syllabus at school. I would love to visit St Petersburg one day as I understand it’s a beautiful city.
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