The Siege - Softcover

Dunmore, Helen

4.03

6,526 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141000732 ISBN 13: 9780141000732

Publisher: Penguin, 2002

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Leningrad, September 1941. German tanks surround the city, imprisoning those who live there. The besieged people of Leningrad face shells, starvation, and the Russian winter. Interweaving two love affairs in two generations, THE SIEGE draws us deep into the Levin's family struggle to stay alive during this terrible winter. It is a story about war and the wounds it inflicts on people's lives. It is also a lyrical and deeply moving celebration of love, life and survival.

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Review:

The final words of Helen Dunmore's The Siege--"No, I shall not wholly die..."(Alexander Pushkin)--respond to the stark threat with which the novel begins: "Re: The future of Leningrad ... The F�hrer has decided to have Leningrad wiped from the face of the earth". In this powerful work of fiction, Dunmore writes through her fascination with one of the most remarkable, and painful, episodes in Russian history: the siege of Leningrad through the winter of 1941 during which untold thousands perished of cold and starvation.

The Siege is a type of memorial, a literary document to an experience in which, as Dunmore writes, "being dead is normal". People die in the streets, in their beds; whole families are frozen, "bodies piled up by the Karpovka canal, or outside the cemeteries". What does it take to survive? Dunmore explores that question through the powerful characters--Anna Levin, Kolya (her child-brother) and Andrei (her lover)--who people this novel, conjuring the contest with death that becomes the daily existence of the Leningraders, their belief in a world beyond the siege. The Siege is itself part of that world, stricken by memory and the question of what it means for a novel (and a novelist) to take on the "flesh of all those other Leningraders who died of hunger in silent, frigid rooms". This is part of the wager, and accomplishment, of Dunmore's extraordinary book and confirmation of the extraordinary skill and sensitivity, of her writing. --Vicky Lebeau

Review:

A Tolstoyan epic of love and war; life and death...she writes beautifully * Sunday Telegraph * Remarkable, affecting...there are few more interesting stories than this; and few writers who could have told it better * Rachel Cusk, Daily Telegraph * Utterly convincing. A deeply moving account of two love stories in terrible circumstances. The story of their struggle to survive appears simple, as all great literature should...A world-class novel * Antony Beevor, The Times * 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 * Sunday Telegraph * A remarkable parable of human survival against the odds * Mail on Sunday * In this wise, humane and beautifully written novel she has written a masterpiece * Independent * A searing historical novel. Dunmore vividly evokes the unbelievable cold, privations and violence as people struggle to survive...an extraordinary description of the horrors of the time * Sunday Express * An important as well as a thrilling work of art * Independent on Sunday * A moving and powerful novel in which Dunmore employs all her celebrated descriptive and narrative skills...beautiful * Daily Mail * A harrowing, urgent narrative of cold, starvation and the battle to survive * Sunday Times *

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