Set at siege of Saint Peter ( or Liengrand if you perfer)two young men are sent out for an impossible task. Get a dozen eggs for a high ranking officer's child's weeding cake. It is a wonderful read for the adventures, and people they meet on the journey.

posted Oct 25, 2009 at 4:44PM

What a story! The premise: during the siege of Leningrad, a Russian boy must gather a dozen eggs by the end of the week to save his own life – a near impossible task. As we are told in the prologue, it is the week that he made his best friend, met his wife, and killed two Germans. Go!

posted Jul 3, 2012 at 10:51AM

A short (250 pages), wonderful novel set in Russia during the siege of Leningrad. Lev is 17, an awkward Jewish virgin, picked up by the Russian police for "looting" (searching a dead German soldier he finds in the street for food--everyone’s starving--or other valuables). Kolya is 20 or so, a cocky, handsome, literature-loving Russian soldier, picked up by the cops for desertion. The two are thrown together in a cell for the night and expect to be executed in the morning. Instead, a colonel gives them a task on a whim: if they can find a dozen eggs for his daughter’s wedding cake in one week (in a country where people have taken to eating rats to survive, where no one’s seen an egg in months, and that’s currently under siege by Germans who would kill them on sight), they’ll be allowed to live. The boys set off. In the space of the next week, Lev will make his best friend, witness brutalities of war he could never have imagined, meet the girl he’ll end up marrying, and kill a man--but the best part of the book might just be the banter between him and Kolya as they slog through the frozen countryside. City of Thieves was published in 2008. I consider it a new classic.

posted Nov 3, 2012 at 1:00PM

This book was such a wonderful story. I would recommend it to anyone who likes great books.

posted Mar 1, 2013 at 4:23PM

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