"The Nazi siege of Leningrad (1941-1943), when the city was cut off from the rest of the world, was one of the most gruesome episodes of World War II. Nearly three million people endured it; just under half of them died, starving or freezing to death, most in the six months from October 1941 to April 1942, when the temperature was often thirty degrees below zero. For twenty-five years the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Harrison Salisbury...

Meredith and Nina are as different as sisters can be. When their father falls ill, they find themselves together, standing with their cold, disapproving mother, Anya. As children their only connection was the Russian fairy tale Anya often told the girls at night. On his deathbed, their father extracts a promise: the fairy tale will be told one last time--and all the way to the end.

"At the beginning of The Siege, sudden news of German attack rips the peaceful Levin family from their countryside retreat, throwing their world into unimagined turmoil. Soon all of Leningrad is trapped by the besieging German army, but daily life must go on. While little Kolya plays with his toy fort, his tiny body grows cruelly thin. While twenty-two-year-old Anna dreams of an artist's life, she must forage for food in the ever more desperate city....

Tatiana is eighteen, pregnant, and widowed when she escapes war-torn Leningrad to find a new life in America. Oceans away in the Soviet Union, Alexander has escaped execution-- and is determined to take his men through the ruins of Europe in one last desperate bid to escape Stalin's death machine and somehow find his way to Tatiana once again.

"Leningrad 1941: the white nights of summer illuminate a city of fallen grandeur whose beautiful palaces and stately avenues speak of a different age, when Leningrad was known as St Petersburg. Two sisters, Tatiana and Dasha, share the same bed, living in one room with their brother and parents. It is a hard, impoverished life, yet the Metanovs know many who are not as fortunate as they. The family routine is shattered on 22 June 1941 when Hitler...

In a novel that moves back and forth between the Soviet Union during World War II and modern-day America, Marina, an elderly Russian woman, recalls vivid images of her youth during the height of the siege of Leningrad.