5 June 2017
"It is an act of literary audacity to set a novel during the siege of Leningrad, more so if you are a British writer born more than a decade after that siege began. How can Helen Dunmore presume to understand the confusion and terror and pain that descended on the city in 1941, a nightmare so distant from the daily experience of her readers and herself? How is she able to convey the strange power of the city once (and now again) known as St. Petersburg, with its ‘crushingly magnificent' buildings, its ‘beauty built on bones'?
