The Siege by Helen Dunmore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’d include this in a lifelong “must read”
I really liked this book, albeit, the story is of an awful event in history, the Siege of St Petersburg.
The siege is one of many stains on history. It lasted 872 days and result in the deaths of some 1.5 million people.
The book was published 20 years ago and I’ve been slow to read get to it, though some parts of the story I did know. Is that from people talking about the siege or the book or me having read it before and completely forgotten? I don’t think it’s the latter but who knows what the Covid and the pandemic has done to my memory! According to Wikipedia some of the most grim aspects of survival were not acknowledged by the Russian state until 2004.
I did visit St Petersburg some years ago and what a beautiful city it is now, filled with enormous palace buildings. The Russians have worked hard to restore the city to its former glory. I can’t imagine what the city looked like after the siege.
The story starts with the protagonist, Anna and her father as they come out of the 1940/41 winter into spring and summer, enjoying life in the summer in their dacha, some miles outside of the city.
Anna has become a mother figure to her young brother Kolya after their mother died shortly after his birth. A friendship is struck up between Anna and a lover of her father’s a famous actress Marina. As events develop and the city is besieged by the Germans, the characters are forced into a family unit, in their apartment in the city. Anna falls in love with a medical student, Andrei and the story follows their relationship and that of her father and Marina, and always, young Kolya, is everyone’s priority.
The story tells the efforts the authorities and civilians went to to try to defend the city and to escape, and the tragedies that result from both. That said, from Anna’s work on city defences, she establishes a friendship that endures and helps her family survive.
The slow demise of their food and fuel supplies and the enormous and desperate efforts they have to resort to, to survive are difficult to read when knowing the story is based on a true event in history where thousands died from starvation and hypothermia. Apparently more died in this siege than from the bombing of Hamburg, Nagasaki and Hiroshima put together. The story is, inevitably not a comfortable read but it’s a compelling story.
There are no spoilers in this review. You’ll have to read it and find out for yourself. The story is as chilling as the lives the characters are forced to live. Reading it in winter is likely to enhance it’s impact!
ShaunOConnell.com 