Helen Dunmore follows the lives of four ordinary people united by love trying to survive the siege of Leningrad in her powerful historical novel 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 & Andrei Anna's novelist father & 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 & 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 & the wounds it inflicts on ordinary people's lives & a profoundly moving celebration of love life & survival. " Remarkable affecting.. .there are few more interesting stories than this; & few writers who could have told it better". (Rachel Cusk " Daily Telegraph"). " Literary writing of the highest order set against a background if suffering so intimately reconstructed it is hard to believe that Dunmore was not there". (Richard Overy " Sunday 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"). Novelist & poet Helen Dunmore has achieved great critical acclaim since publishing her first adult novel the Mc Kitterick Prize winning " Zennor in Darkness". Her novels " Counting the Stars" " Your Blue-Eyed Boy" " With Your Crooked Heart" " Burning Bright" " House of Orphans" " Mourning Ruby" "A Spell of Winter" & " Talking to the Dead" & her collection of short stories " Love of Fat Men" are all published by Penguin. This edition
Includes:: the first chapter of " Betrayal" the sequel to " The Siege"."