Helen Dunmore writes with the sensibility of a poet, and is also good at the practical matter of telling a compelling story. Her novel, A Spell of Winter, which won the Orange Prize, was beautifully written, but told a disappointingly banal story. Her talents also seemed wasted on her last novel, With Your Crooked Heart, a psychological thriller about small time crooks. With the siege of Leningrad, Helen Dunmore has finally found a challenge worthy of her considerable gifts.
The novel begins in the summer of 1941, shortly before the Germans bombed Kiev, bringing the Soviet Union into the war. Anna is at the dacha with her father, Mikhail, a writer who has fallen out of favour under Stalin's regime. Now 23, Anna left college at 17 when her mother died in childbirth, leaving her to bring up a brother, Kolya. Instead of training as an artist, Anna works as a nursery assistant. This prelude cleverly shows how difficult it was to lay up provisions for the Russian winter, even under normal circumstances. Without the vegetables that Anna grows at the dacha, the wild berries that she preserves, and the honey and goose fat that she acquires by barter, the small family would soon run short of food. Anna falls in love with Andre, the young medical student who brings news of her father's injury at the front. After her father returns, an old flame of his, the actress Marina Petrovna, takes refuge in the small apartment. Her presence allows Anna to volunteer for the digging of defensive trenches, where she makes friends with cheerful young worker, Evgenia, who reappears at key moments, like a guardian angel, and is instrumental in ensuring Anna's survival.
The story of the two couples, one young, one older, and the child, progressing through the winter, has a classic simplicity. What holds the reader's attention is the convincing way the background events of history unfold, and affect the central characters. Dunmore uses the sense of smell most effectively, and the extreme cold and the experience of near-starvation are vividly conveyed.
Alannah Hopkin is a writer and critic