2024/019: The Siege — Helen Dunmore

2024/019: The Siege — Helen Dunmore

Words are regaining their meanings, after years of masquerade. Hunger means hunger, terror means terror, enemy means enemy. It’s not like trying to read mirror-writing any more. Everything gets clearer day by day, as siege and winter eat into their lives. The coils of Soviet life are losing their strength. There’s only the present left, and it has burned away both past and future. There’s only the dark, besieged, freezing city, and the Germans outside, dug into their winter positions, waiting, stamping their feet. [loc. 3000]

Reading The Lost Pianos of Siberia awakened my interest in the Siege of Leningrad. Luckily my Kindle contained Helen Dunmore's well-regarded novel, The Siege.

Anna is a nursery assistant who lives in Leningrad with her little brother Kolya and her father Mikhail, a writer who's fallen out of favour with the authorities. When the German army invades in the summer of 1941, they think it will all be over soon.( Read more... )