City of Thieves

by David Benioff

Four months into the siege of Leningrad, the city is starving. Seventeen-year-old Lev fears for his life when he is arrested for looting the body of a dead German paratrooper, while his charismatic cellmate Kolya, a handsome young soldier arrested for desertion, seems bizarrely unafraid.

Dawn brings, instead of the execution squad, an impossible challenge. Lev and Kolya can find a dozen eggs for an NKVD colonel to use for his daughter's wedding cake, and live. Or fail, and die.

In the depths of the coldest winter in history, through a city cut off from all supplies and suffering appalling deprivation, man and boy embark on an absurd hunt. Their search will take them through desolate, lawless Leningrad and the devastated countryside surrounding it, in the captivating journey of two men trying to survive against desperate odds.

• ISBN10: 1436260884
• ISBN13: 9781436260886
• Publish Date: 15 May 2008 (first published 1 May 2008)
• Publish Status: Active
• Imprint: Plume Books
• Format: eBook
• Pages: 272
• Language: English

Reviews

[gmcgregor]

In David Benioff's City of Thieves, Lev Beniov is an introverted Jewish teenager living through the siege of Leningrad during WWII. One night, watching for air strikes on the roof of his apartment building with his friends, they spot a paratrooper and race through the streets (well after curfew, of course) and run after him. The man is dead, and the teenagers steal whatever they can off his body, with Lev in particular snagging a knife. The police spot them and the kids run...but Lev is caught. Thrown in the notorious local jail, he thinks he's dead. Then his cell opens in the night to admit Kolya, a bold 20something in a military uniform who claims that he was snagged after going AWOL to defend his thesis. Instead of being executed in the morning as Lev fears, he and Kolya are given a task: to collect two dozen eggs in a starving city for a wedding cake.

What emerges from there is a fairly predictable quest narrative. Lev and Kolya journey within the city and eventually outside of it to find the eggs they need to get their ration cards (i.e. their only link to the extremely limited supply of food) back, and as they encounter characters and obstacles and characters who are obstacles, they grow closer. We know that Lev survives into the present day because of the framing device Benioff uses, in which he presents Lev as his own grandfather relating the story to him, but exactly how he does, and what will become of the people around him are unknowns that propel the plot forward. Both Kolya and Lev are well-written characters, and although the structure of their journey is a familiar one, Benioff's prose is lively and entertaining and a pleasure to read.

I was happily surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. I picked it up because Benioff is a producer of Game of Thrones, one of my favorite TV shows, and I'd heard it was pretty decent, but I usually have a hard time connecting with stories that feel decidedly "masculine". But this was a coming-of-age story that wasn't overly steeped in gendered notions of what that means. It's still more masculine than feminine, but not to the point where I felt alienated from it as I often do with stories that posit violence and/or emotional repression as what it means to become a man. It's as much as anything a story about a brief, intense friendship that forever changed a teenager, and who can't relate to that narrative? I definitely recommend this book, I'm already looking forward to re-reading it someday!

[ibeforem]

The great thing about this novel is that it taught me a lot about what life may have been like in Leningrad (and other parts of Russia) during World War II. The not-so-great thing is that I started listening to this without really reading anything about it, so I completely thought that it really was based on the author’s grandfather. I have to say that I was a bit disappointed to find out it wasn’t the case! But, true or not, this was a great story. Something as simple as the search for some eggs for a wedding cake turns into an adventure that changes Lev’s life. Kolya’s “voice” was fantastic as he vacillated between being funny, serious, and cocky. There’s a lot of sadness here, some of it explored and some of it glossed over. Benioff was smart to frame this as a grandfather telling his story to his grandson, because he made me believe — in Lev and in happy endings.