num_pages: 304
description: Called "elegantly, starkly beautiful" by The New York Times Book Review, The Siege is Helen Dunmore's masterpiece. Her canvas is monumental -- the Nazis' 1941 winter siege on Leningrad that killed six hundred thousand -- but her focus is heartrendingly intimate. One family, the Levins, fights to stay alive in their small apartment, held together by the unlikely courage and resourcefulness of twenty-two-year-old Anna. Though she dreams of an artist's life, she must instead forage for food in the ever more desperate city and watch her little brother grow cruelly thin. Their father, a blacklisted writer who once advocated a robust life of the mind, withers in spirit and body. At such brutal times everything is tested. And yet Dunmore's inspiring story shows that even then, the triumph of the human heart is that love need not fall away.
language: English
title: The Siege
titlecomplete: The Siege (The Siege, #1)
genres: Historical, Literary Fiction, World War II, Novels, Russia, War, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Adult Fiction, Romance
ratings_count: 6306
places: Russia, Eastern Europe, St. Petersburg, Leningrad, USSR
series: The Siege
awards: awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Orange Prize
category: Fiction Shortlist, awardedAt: 978336000000
name: Whitbread Award
category: Novel
publisher: Grove Press