Product Description

Leningrad in 1952 is a city recovering from war, where Andrei, a young hospital doctor and Anna, a nursery school teacher, are forging a life together. Summers at the dacha, preparations for the hospital ball, work and the care of sixteen year old Kolya fill their minds. They try hard to avoid coming to the attention of the authorities.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #158895 in Books
• Published on: 2010-04-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Features

• New
• Mint Condition
• Dispatch same day for order received before 12 noon
• Guaranteed packaging
• No quibbles returns

Review
Enthralling. Emotionally gripping . . . ordinary people struggling against a city's beautiful indifference, and clinging on for dear life (Daily Telegraph )

Beautifully crafted, gripping, moving, enlightening. Sure to be one of the best historical novels of the year (Time Out )

Scrupulous, pitch-perfect. With heart-pounding force, Dunmore builds up a double narrative of suspense (Sunday Times )

Magnificent, brave, tender . . . with a unique gift for immersing the reader in the taste, smell and fear of a story (Independent on Sunday )

A masterpiece. An extraordinarily powerful evocation of a time of unimaginable fear. We defy you to read it without a pounding heart and a lump in your throat (Grazia )

A beautifully written and deeply moving story about fear, loss, love and honesty amid the demented lies of Stalin's last days. I literally could not put it down (Antony Beevor )

Dunmore chillingly evokes the atmosphere of Soviet suspicion, where whispered rumours and petty grievances metastasise into lies and denunciation. A gripping read (Daily Mail )

Meticulous, clever, eloquent. An absorbing and thoughtful tale of good people in hard times (Guardian )

A remarkably feeling, nuanced novel that satisfies the head as well as the heart. This does not read like a retelling of history, but like a draught of real life. With her seemingly small canvas, Dunmore has created a universe (Sunday Herald )

Dunmore's genius lies in her ability to convey the strange Soviet atmosphere of these very Soviet stories using the most subtle of clues (Spectator )

Storytelling on a grand scale (The Times )

About the Author
Helen Dunmore has published eleven novels with Penguin: Zennor in Darkness, which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the Orange Prize; 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 for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby; House of Orphans; Counting the Stars and The Betrayal which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010. She is also a poet, children's novelist and short-story writer.