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City of Thieves: A Novel
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Manufacturer: Viking Adult
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780670018703
ISBN: 0670018708
Label: Viking Adult
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 2008-05-15
Publisher: Viking Adult
Studio: Viking Adult
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Editorial Reviews:
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As wise and funny as it is thrilling and original—the story of two young men on an impossible adventure
A writer visits his retired grandparents in Florida to document their experience during the infamous siege of Leningrad. His grandmother won’t talk about it, but his grandfather reluctantly consents. The result is the captivating odyssey of two young men trying to survive against desperate odds.
Lev Beniov considers himself “built for deprivation.” He’s small, smart, and insecure, a Jewish virgin too young for the army, who spends his nights working as a volunteer firefighter with friends from his building. When a dead German paratrooper lands in his street, Lev is caught looting the body and dragged to jail, fearing for his life. He shares his cell with the charismatic and grandiose Kolya, a handsome young soldier arrested on desertion charges. Instead of the standard bullet in the back of the head, Lev and Kolya are given a shot at saving their own lives by complying with an outrageous directive: secure a dozen eggs for a powerful colonel to use in his daughter’s wedding cake. In a city cut off from all supplies and suffering unbelievable deprivation, Lev and Kolya embark on a hunt to find the impossible. A search that takes them through the dire lawlessness of Leningrad and the devastated surrounding countryside creates an unlikely bond between this earnest, lust-filled teenager and an endearing lothario with the gifts of a conman. Set within the monumental events of history, City of Thieves is an intimate coming-of-age tale with an utterly contemporary feel for how boys become men.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Absolutely rivetting!
Comment: I have just finished reading David Benioff's "City of Thieves" and what a great read it is! Based on his maternal grandfather's experience as a teenager arrested for looting at the height of the siege of Leningrad in 1942, the book documents what happens when his grandfather, Lev Beniov, and a cocky Red Army deserter, Kolya, are given a chance to cheat execution by fulfilling a seemingly impossible task set for them by the local Police Chief who arrested them. The novel really takes off at that point and is quite unputdownable. The tale of Lev and his over-confident, braggard partner-in-crime, Kolya, is nothing short of gripping. Lev's experience of the siege is unique, and the characters he meets and the situations he finds himself in are remarkable, to say the least. Benioff brings his cast of characters to life brilliantly and the picture he paints of Leningrad in the grip of the siege is both vivid and heartbreaking. All in all, a fabulous book that I highly recommend. Two thumbs up for this 5-star effort!
Customer Rating:
Summary: A young author to watch out for ......
Comment: Benioff is a very young author who is going to make it big if he keeps on churning out this type of readable books. The Siege of Leningrad is a very difficult subject to conjure up a sizzling mixture of humour amidst the hell that it was but the author does it both believably and masterfully with the hate/love rapport between the virgin Jew boy Lev and the street wise, horny Kolya as they embark on their ridiculous quest for a dozen eggs in a starving city. I cannot wait to get into Benioff's first novel "The 25th Hour"!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Comment: I was moved to pick up City of Thieves on two counts: first off, David Benioff is one of the writers and producers of HBO's forthcoming adaption of George RR Martin's A Game of Thrones, and I wanted to see how good a writer he was. Secondly, and more importantly, it is a novel set during the Siege of Leningrad, one of the lesser-explored conflicts of World War II but an area I studied several years ago, most notably through Harrison Salisbury's masterpiece of historical investigation, The 900 Days, and I wanted to see if the book could bring that conflict to life.
The first week of January, 1942. The city of Leningrad has been under siege by the German Army Group North and the Finnish Army for over four months. The city is blockaded by land and sea, and the only relief route for supplies is a precarious road built into the frozen surface of Lake Ladoga (interestingly, not mentioned in the novel). By night German and Russian artillery batteries exchange salvos and the city's population works furiously in the factories even as they slowly starve. Yet in the eyes of the world the siege is a sideshow to the furious battle raging outside Moscow which will help decide the outcome of the Second World War.
To the people of Leningrad the siege is dangerously real. Hundreds of thousands of the city's populace are already dead, and those who survive find their rations reduced to a few grams of bread per day. For seventeen-year-old Lev and his friends, working as firefighters during the Luftwaffe's nightly visits to the city, finding extra food is a dream. When a German parachutist, killed by the cold, falls outside their apartment block they loot his corpse mercilessly, hoping he has food on him. Unfortunately, they are discovered by the NKVD. Lev is arrested as a looter and spends the night in a cell with a charismatic deserter, Kolya. Come the morning, they both prepare for the firing squad but are instead given an impossible mission by an unusually gracious NKVD colonel: to find a dozen eggs for his daughter's wedding cake and be forgiven for their crimes.
So a desperate search begins, as the young, shy, chess-playing Lev and the carefree, flamboyant and almost suicidally brave Kolya fight off the cold and hunger as their mad quest takes them from the besieged city to the countryside beyond where partisans and German counter-insurgency troops fight a bitter guerrilla war.
City of Thieves is at heart a mismatched buddy story, but one told with wit and charm. The two protagonists (one of whom sadly isn't David Benioff's grandfather, despite what the introduction indicates) are superbly drawn, especially the irrepressible Kolya whose artistic ambitions and insatiable appreciation of female charms combine to make a tremendously amusing character. The hardships and deprivations the people of the city are living under is mostly accurately described, although the general feeling from The 900 Days was that by this point the people of the city were so weak that gallivanting off on 30-kilometre walks into the countryside and taking part in combat with German stormtroopers would probably be beyond the physical capabilities of most inhabitants. Still, even taking this into account Benioff does a good job of portraying the hardships faced by the city, although notably he doesn't dwell on some of the more grisly details (the corpses left on the streets or ill-advisedly dumped in the river because no-one had the energy to bury them).
The story is straightforward, but well-told, and the ending is as close to happy as it can realistically be, with a nasty but predictable twist hidden behind a more unexpected and gut-wrenching one.
City of Thieves (****½) is a splendid, gripping read with a dark sense of gallows humour and some vivid but occasionally disturbing imagery. Well-recommended.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Not that great story I was expecting
Comment: This book is similar to other books written be contemporary writers, specially Americans: they are written as screenplay pitches.
It is a quick and short read. I think the only thing I learned was that Shostakovich didn't stay in Leningrad through the whole siege. I thought he stayed. Learning history is not the reason why I read fiction, so I am all right with that. But with so many reviews here saying that this book provides new insight to the siege, I thought I could learn more about it. Or maybe someone in Russia may need to revitalize Stalin, so telling people what happened there can be as important as telling the Holocaust story. These stories shall never be forgotten. With that in mind, City of Thieves is more than entertainment.
Somehow,the cynicism of war reminded me "The Good, the bad and the ugly".
My problem with this book was the resolution. I don't want to give away too much, but the first part of the resolution (chapters 23 and 24) was inconceivable and the second part (chapter 25) predictable. The book lost two stars because of that.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great read, till the end.
Comment: Good book, loved it till the end, when a completely unnecessary plot twist absolutely pissed me off. I hate when that happens and it drove down my rating of this book. I cannot tell you how unnecessary it was and was a complete cop-out. Boo David, Boo.
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