Publisher Description

Helen Dunmore's classic novel reissued with a stunning new lookLeningrad, 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.

Notes

Reissue with a new jacket design.

Author Biography

Helen Dunmore was an award-winning novelist, children's author and poet. She published twelve novels including Zennor in Darkness, which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the inaugural Orange Prize in 1996; Talking to the Dead; Your Blue-Eyed Boy; With Your Crooked Heart; The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby and House of Orphans. She was posthumously awarded the Costa 2017 prize for her poetry collection Inside the Wave.

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 *
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 -- Richard Overy * 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 *

Review Text

A harrowing, urgent narrative of cold, starvation and the battle to survive

Review Quote

A Tolstoyan epic of love and war; life and death...she writes beautifully

Details