The Siege by Helen Dunmore follows a young woman, Anna, who is thrust into the primary caretaker role for her family during the deadly 1941 Siege of Leningrad. With a [unemployed] writer father and a infant brother, and her mother having passed at her brother’s birth, Anna is the de facto leader of her family. She gets military work to dig tank traps around the city in addition to foraging for food and wood, standing in breadlines, and constantly putting herself in harm’s way to trade for scraps to keep her brother alive.
Anna’s Leningrad apartment is also occupied by former neighbor Marina, who was also a former lover of Anna’s father. Anna eventually meets and takes in Andrei, with whom she forms a romantic bond–yet their time for youthful romance is stunted in the dire circumstance of survival. The interesting dichotomy here is that at a time when young love should flourish and is viewed in a very romanticized way, Andrei and Anna are thrust into very unique situation where they are drawn closer by circumstance and seem to share years of wisdom, experience, and health hardships all in the span of months. War, siege, and starvation accelerate their comfort levels and relationship, as it did with many during such a time and place.
Helen Dumore’s writing is Literary Historical Fiction at its finest. I found myself re-reading sentences simply because of how beautiful and uniquely worded they were, which is not something I often find myself doing while reading. Not only is her prose both delicate and gritty in encapsulating the fleeting beauty and ugliness of life, but she also excels at capturing the desperate, harsh, and unforgiving siege of starvation, freezing cold temperatures, and war.
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