An excellent review, I read the book about a year ago and now it is our current book club read so I was looking for an overview to remind me. Just discovered this site, it is brilliant and one which I am sure I will be returning to time and time again. Thank you!
The Siege is a type of memorial, a literary document to an experience in which, as Dunmore writes, "being dead is normal". People die in the streets, in their beds; whole families are frozen, "bodies piled up by the Karpovka canal, or outside the cemeteries". What does it take to survive? Dunmore explores that question through the powerful characters--Anna Levin, Kolya (her child-brother) and Andrei (her lover)--who people this novel, conjuring the contest with death that becomes the daily existence of the Leningraders, their belief in a world beyond the siege. The Siege is itself part of that world, stricken by memory and the question of what it means for a novel (and a novelist) to take on the "flesh of all those other Leningraders who died of hunger in silent, frigid rooms". This is part of the wager, and accomplishment, of Dunmore's extraordinary book and confirmation of the extraordinary skill and sensitivity, of her writing. --Vicky Lebeau
The Siege Helen Dunmore Book Club Questions
Helen Dunmore is the author of fourteen novels including Zennor in Darkness, A Spell of Winter and The Siege. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. Exposure is published by Hutchinson in Hardback and eBook. Read more.helendunmore.com
Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crisis Changed the World by Adam ToozeTooze weaves together a good but unoriginal breakdown of the events leading to the crisis of 2008 (he studiously avoids questions around deeper structural factors). After the reader is up to speed, the books brings the reader on a tour tracing the way this crisis has shaped political, social, economic outcomes across the world but particularly in the EU and US. 2ff7e9595c
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