It is, in part, a coming of age story set in the World War II siege of Leningrad. But June seemed like paradise by winter.City of Thieves is a 2008 historical fiction novel by David Benioff. In June of 1941, before the Germans came, we thought we were poor.

When we slept, if we slept, we dreamed of the feasts we had carelessly eaten seven months earlier - all that buttered bread, the potato dumplings, the sausages - eaten with disregard, swallowing without tasting, leaving great crumbs on our plates, scraps of fat. You have never been so hungry you have never been so cold. This story is alternately funny and heartbreaking, exhilarating and unsettling - a vivid look at the messy and frantically alive moments of war, growing up, and enduring friendship. They scour the city, and then - driven by desperation - sneak through the blockade to continue their quest behind enemy lines. Lev and Kolya, forced into an uneasy partnership, resign themselves to their fate: eggs or death, with the latter the most likely outcome. And ration bread - ‘Everything that could be added to the recipe without poisoning people was added to the recipe.’ - was normal. A half onion divided amongst four people for a New Year’s feast was normal.

A pot of soup made from a single potato was normal. But in their city of 1942, eating the paste from book spines (for protein) was normal. Under normal circumstances, the acquisition of 12 eggs wouldn’t be a big deal. It is terrible luck, a wedding with no cake.’ His daughter - beautiful, well-fed, fur-wrapped - is to be married in a week, and her parents wish her to have a proper wedding: ‘This is a tradition, says my wife, we need a cake. The next morning, a Soviet colonel makes the boys an offer they literally cannot refuse: find a dozen eggs. When an unusual event tempts Lev and his childhood friends into looting a corpse - a crime against the State even in wartime - he’s chucked into a jail cell with Kolya, a handsome soldier, just 20 years old and accused of desertion. And for another, he’s hungry - starving, in fact. For one thing, he’s Jewish and, times being what they were, that was not a good thing to be. This story picks up a year later, as the city’s resident waste away from nightly bombings and dwindling food supply.Īmid this horror, fate seems to have taken a particular dislike to 17-year-old Lev Beniov. Petersburg) and cut it off from the rest of Russia. In real life, on September 8, 1941, the German army surrounded Leningrad (now St. Our intrepid heroes form an unlikely friendship, develop dangerous enemies, argue about life, and get lost in the snow - all while in search of a perfect dozen eggs. This sweet and suspenseful novel is almost a buddy comedy - except the action takes place during the 872-day siege of Leningrad in 1941.

City of Thieves by David Benioff