The Siege
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.
Reviews
The Siege is a very gripping narrative of courage and endurance in the face of unimaginable (to those fortunate enough to have always lived in a democracy) political fear and hardship. Through the character of Anna's father, a poet, it is also a telling analysis of the sustenance literature can offer even when it is under severe censorship. Readers might like to read Dunmore's The Betrayal,written ten or so years after The Siege as it is something of a sequel.
