Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

"MT Anderson came to YA with some serious writing chops. He’s primarily known as a YA novelist. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation , an immensely clever story about an enslaved boy living in Boston during the Revolution, is probably his most famous book to date. I love it. Symphony for the City of the Dead is, in brief, the story of the Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich and his Seventh Symphony, which he composed during the 444-day Siege of Leningrad by Hitler’s armies during World War Two . Estimates are that a million people died during the siege. Anderson’s book is about that piece of music and its significance, but it’s also about Leningrad and Russia. Overlaid on all of that, it’s also almost an espionage caper—with the microfilm holding the Seventh Symphony score spirited out of Russia and following an unbelievably byzantine route that brought it to the United States. The plan was to perform the symphony as a way of drumming up support for Russia during World War Two. This is subject matter that is very, very challenging and important. It must’ve taken years of research. It’s an incredibly multilayered history and narrative, both fast-paced and readable. I recommended it to many of my adult friends who read serious nonfiction, because it delivers for any reader. Giving space and attention to the detail of setting allows reader to see a story and envision the environment of revolutionary Russia—and in the case of Spies, for example, Moscow in 1973. Endless paragraphs of thick description won’t work. Cinematic approaches give readers just enough detail to imagine what a historical setting was like and then move swiftly from scene-to-scene. Sheinkin and Anderson both do that really well."