The Siege is a 2001 historical novel by English writer Helen Dunmore. It is set in Leningrad just before and during the Siege of Leningrad by German forces in World War II.
Anna is a nursery-school assistant who lives in a dacha outside Leningrad with her father Mikhail and her young brother Kolya. Germany invades the Soviet Union in June 1941 and approaches Leningrad. Anna’s family, and thousands of others, flee to the safety of the city. Mikhail joins the People’s Volunteers to fight the advancing Germans, while Anna and thousands of other women dig anti-tank traps on the city’s outskirts. By September the German army overruns Leningrad’s outer defences and encircle the city, cutting off its food supplies.
With winter approaching and strict food rationing, life becomes a struggle for the city’s inhabitants. Andrei, a medical student from the hospital, brings a wounded Mikhail home to Anna’s apartment. Frequent visits by Andrei to care for her father brings them close and he moves in with her and Kolya. The winter of 1941–42 is brutal and they struggle with freezing temperatures and the threat of starvation. Limited food supplies arrive via the ice road over the frozen Lake Ladoga, but they are nowhere near sufficient to feed the city of over three million people. Mikhail never recovers from his injuries and dies. Anna and Andrei cannot bury him because they are too weak.
By May 1942 the German siege of Leningrad is still in place, but with the spring thaw, more supply routes open up to the city bringing in vital food and supplies. Rationing eases and while the city’s survivors are still hungry, they are no longer starving. Anna, Andrei and Kolya have survived, and though they are still weak from malnutrition, they enjoy the outdoors in the sunshine. The nursery-school has re-opened and Anna is busy again. They bury Anna’s father alongside thousands of others. Half of Leningrad’s population died that winter.
