Helen Dunmore
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Information about the author.
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The Siege: A Novel
Helen Dunmore
The Siege is Helen Dunmore’s masterpiece. Her canvas is monumental—the Nazis’ 1941 winter siege on Leningrad that killed six hundred thousand—but her focus is heartrendingly intimate. One family, the Levins, fights to stay alive in their small apartment, held together by the unlikely courage and resourcefulness of twenty-two-year-old Anna. Though she dreams of an artist’s life, she must instead forage for food in the ever more desperate city and watch her little brother grow cruelly thin. Their father, a blacklisted writer who once advocated a robust life of the mind, withers in spirit and body. At such brutal times everything is tested. And yet Dunmore’s inspiring story shows that even then, the triumph of the human heart is that love need not fall away.
Amid the turmoil of the siege, the unimaginable happens—two people enter the Levins’ frozen home and bring a kind of romance where before there was only bare survival. A sensitive young doctor becomes Anna’s devoted partner, and her father is allowed a transcendent final episode with a mysterious woman from his past.
A Spell of Winter: A Novel
Helen Dunmore
Bearing the distinctive lyrical beauty of her predecessors, A Spell of Winter asserts Dunmore’s claim to the territories staked out by some of the great nineteenth-century novelists. But with a strong, sensuous magic and a modern understanding of love that is all her own, Dunmore defies all the old formulas.
Catherine and her brother, Rob, do not know why they have been abandoned by their parents. In the house of their grandfather, “the man from nowhere,” they forge a passionate refuge for themselves against the terror of family secrets, and while the world outside moves to the brink of war, their sibling love becomes fraught with dangers. But as Catherine fights free of the past, the spell of winter that has held her in its grasp begins to break.
The novel’s rich imagery moves between the stark, harsh winter world that Catherine loves and the warm summers she loathes, when the air is thick with the scent of roses and painful memories. Through decades of changing seasons, the two siblings mature within an enclosed world in which they are virtually imprisoned by servants…
