The Siege

Called "elegantly, starkly beautiful" by The New York Times Book Review, The Siege is Helen Dunmore's masterpiece. Her canvas is monumental - the Nazis' 1941 winter siege on Leningrad that killed six hundred thousand - but her focus is heartrendingly intimate.

"Remarkable, affecting... there are few more interesting stories than this; and few writers who could have told it better."  -  Rachel Cusk, Daily Telegraph 

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... 

"Literary writing of the highest order set against a background of suffering so intimately reconstructed it is hard to believe that Dunmore was not there."  -  Richard Overy, Sunday Telegraph 

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.