The Siege
Helen Dunmore
  • Published: 17 July 2002
  • ISBN: 9780141924977
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304
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The Siege

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Leningrad, September 1941. German tanks surround the city, imprisoning those who live there. The besieged people of Leningrad face shells, starvation, and the Russian winter. Interweaving two love affairs in two generations, THE SIEGE draws us deep into the Levin's family struggle to stay alive during this terrible winter. It is a story about war and the wounds it inflicts on people's lives. It is also a lyrical and deeply moving celebration of love, life and survival.
  • Published: 17 July 2002
  • ISBN: 9780141924977
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Helen Dunmore

Helen Dunmore was an award-winning novelist, children’s author and poet who will be remembered for the depth and breadth of her fiction. Rich and intricate, yet narrated with a deceptive simplicity that made all of her work accessible and heartfelt, her writing stood out for the fluidity and lyricism of her prose, and her extraordinary ability to capture the presence of the past.

Her first novel, Zennor in Darkness, explored the events which led D. H. Lawrence to be expelled from Cornwall on suspicion of spying, and won the McKitterick Prize. Her third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996, and she went on to become a Sunday Times bestseller with The Siege, which was described by Antony Beevor as a ‘world-class novel’ and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Orange Prize. Published in 2010, her eleventh novel, The Betrayal, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and The Lie in 2014 was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the 2015 RSL Ondaatje Prize.

Her final novel, Birdcage Walk, deals with legacy and recognition – what writers, especially women writers, can expect to leave behind them – and was described by the Observer as ‘the finest novel Helen Dunmore has written’. She died in June 2017, and in January 2018, she was posthumously awarded the Costa Prize for her volume of poetry, Inside the Wave.

portrait photo of Helen Dunmore

Also by Helen Dunmore

Girl, Balancing
Girl, Balancing & Other Stories
Birdcage Walk
Exposure
Love of Fat Men
The Lie
The Land Lubbers Lying Down Below
See all

Praise for The Siege

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