The War Within

Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize 2018 We are living the primitive life of savages on an uninhabited island. A historian at Boston University, Alexis Peri was interviewing survivors of the Second World War when she stumbled across an extraordinary, previously unseen archive. It contained 125 diaries, chronicling the reality of life for ordinary people during the 872 days of the German blockade of Leningrad. The siege was one of the longest and most notorious in modern history, costing almost a million civilian lives. Pulling together the voices of those who lived through the experience, Alexis Peri tells the tragic, intimate story of how citizens struggled to make sense of a world collapsing around them.