Matterhorn By Karl Marlantes
Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer-s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones-s The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.
Written by a highly decorated Marine veteran over the course of thirty years, Matterhorn is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel that brings to life an entire world-both its horrors and its thrills-and seems destined to become a classic of combat literature.
The Secret Life of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd
Now in paperback comes the intoxicating debut novel of "one motherless daughter's discover of ... the strange and wondrous places we find love" ("The Washington Post"). Sue Monk Kidd's ravishing work is set in South Carolina in 1964.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells-taken without her knowledge-became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they-d weigh more than 50 million metric tons-as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb-s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.
Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.
Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the "colored" ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta-s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia-a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo-to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.
Henrietta-s family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family-past and present-is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.
Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family-especially Henrietta-s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother-s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn-t her children afford health insurance?
Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.
Let The Great World Spin By Colum McCann
An American masterpiece from internationally bestselling novelist Colum McCann-a dazzling and hauntingly rich vision of the loveliness, pain, and mystery of New York City in the 1970s
In the dawning light of the late summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. . . . It is August, 1974, and a tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter-mile in the sky. In the streets below, ordinary lives become extraordinary as award-winning novelist Colum McCann crafts this stunningly realized portrait of a city and its people.
Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among prostitutes in the Bronx. A group of mothers, gathered in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn the sons who died in Vietnam, discovers how much divides them even in their grief. Further uptown, Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenaged daughter, determined not only to take care of her "babies" but to prove her own worth.
Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann-s powerful novel comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city-s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the tightrope walker-s "artistic crime of the century."
McCann-s most ambitious work to date, Let the Great World Spin is an unmistakable and triumphantly American masterpiece.
House Rules By Jodi Picoult
JODI PICOULT is the author of seventeen novels, including Handle With Care, Change of Heart, Nineteen Minutes, and My Sister's Keeper, now a major motion picture. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and three children. Visit her website at www.jodipicoult.com.
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister By Gregory Maguire
On seeing her portrait, a servant girl modelling for an artist in 17th century Holland realizes she is ugly. But the portrait opens her eyes to the world of art, she becomes a painter and is transformed by her work so that when a prince charming appears she is no longer ugly.
The Girl Who Played With Fire By Stieg Larsson
The electrifying follow-up to the phenomenal best seller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ("An intelligent, ingeniously plotted, utterly engrossing thriller" -The Washington Post), and this time it is Lisbeth Salander, the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker, who is the focus and fierce heart of the story.
Mikael Blomkvist-crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium-has decided to publish a story exposing an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government.
On the eve of publication, the two reporters responsible for the story are brutally murdered. But perhaps more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander.
Now, as Blomkvist-alone in his belief in her innocence-plunges into his own investigation of the slayings, Salander is drawn into a murderous hunt in which she is the prey, and which compels her to revisit her dark past in an effort to settle with it once and for all.
The White Rose By Jean Hanff Korelitz
Passion, infidelity, social climbing, cross-dressing, and one very special white rose weave a seductive narrative in this intelligent and tender novel. At forty-eight, Marian Kahn, a professor of history at Columbia, has reached a comfortable perch. Married, wealthy, and the famed discoverer of that eighteenth-century adventuress, Lady Charlotte Wilcox, she ought to be content. Instead, she is horrified to find herself profoundly in love with Oliver, the son of her oldest friend.
When Marian's cousin, the snobbish Barton, announces his engagement to Sophie, a graduate student in Marian's department, Marian, Oliver, and Sophie find themselves in an awkward triangle. As a risky charade brings their affairs to a climax, all three of them learn that love is seldom straightforward, but always a gift. From the West Village to the Upper East Side, from the Hamptons to Millbrook, The White Rose is at once a nuanced and affectionate reimagining of Strauss' beloved opera, Der Rosenkavalier, and a mesmerizing novel of our own time and place.
Under The Dome By Stephen King
On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener's hand is severed as "the dome" comes down on it, people running errands in the neighboring town are divided from their families, and cars explode on impact. No one can fathom what this barrier is, where it came from, and when -- or if -- it will go away.
Dale Barbara, Iraq vet and now a short-order cook, finds himself teamed with a few intrepid citizens -- town newspaper owner Julia Shumway, a physician's assistant at the hospital, a select-woman, and three brave kids. Against them stands Big Jim Rennie, a politician who will stop at nothing -- even murder -- to hold the reins of power, and his son, who is keeping a horrible secret in a dark pantry. But their main adversary is the Dome itself. Because time isn't just short. It's running out.
Sarah's key By Tatiana de Rosnay
Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel? d?Hiv? roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours. Paris, May 2002: On Vel? d?Hiv?s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past.
Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her toSarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins toquestion her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life. Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode.
Things Fall Apart By Chinua Achebe
This expanded edition of Chinua Achebe's first novel portrays the collision of African and European cultures in an Igbo village. Okonkwo, a great man in Igbo traditional society, cannot adapt to the profound changes brought by the British conquest of Nigeria. Yet, as in classic tragedy, Okonkwo's character as well as external forces contribute to his downfall.This expanded edition includes new illustrations, maps, additional essays on history, culture,and literature, and reference material to help readers see Achebe's classic novel in social and historical context, and to understand its place in world literature.
The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls
Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an "excitement addict." Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.
Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town -- and the family -- Rex Walls had done everything he could to escape. He drank. He stole the grocery money and disappeared for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents' betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home.
What is so astonishing about Jeannette Walls is not just that she had the guts and tenacity and intelligence to get out, but that she describes her parents with such deep affection and generosity. Hers is a story of triumph against all odds, but also a tender, moving tale of unconditional love in a family that despite its profound flaws gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.
For two decades, Jeannette Walls hid her roots. Now she tells her own story. A regular contributor to MSNBC.com, she lives in New York and Long Island and is married to the writer John Taylor.
The Lovely Bones By Alice Sebold
When we first meet 14-year-old Susie Salmon, she is already in heaven. This was before milk carton photos and public service announcements, she tells us; back in 1973, when Susie mysteriously disappeared, people still believed these things didn't happen. In the sweet, untroubled voice of a precocious teenage girl, Susie relates the awful events of her death and her own adjustment to the strange new place she finds herself. It looks a lot like her school playground, with the good kind of swing sets.
With love, longing, and a growing understanding, Susie watches her family as they cope with their grief, her father embarks on a search for the killer, her sister undertakes a feat of amazing daring, her little brother builds a fort in her honor and begin the difficult process of healing. In the hands of a brilliant novelist, this story of seemingly unbearable tragedy is transformed into a suspenseful and touching story about family, memory, love, heaven, and living.
The Spies of Warsaw By Alan Furst
In 1937 Warsaw, on the eve of World War II, intelligence operatives on both sides of the forthcoming struggle wage their own espionage battle in a world of betrayal, intrigue, and abduction, including Colonel Jean Franois Mercier, a decorated hero drawn into a passionate love affair with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage, a lawyer for the League of Nations.
Snow By Orhan Pamuk
Dread, yearning, identity, intrigue, the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism, these are the elements that Orhan Pamuk anneals in this masterful, disquieting novel. An exiled poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head scarves.
But Ka is also drawn by his memories of the radiant Ipek, now recently divorced. Amid blanketing snowfall and universal suspicion, Ka finds himself pursued by figures ranging from Ipeks exhusband to a charismatic terrorist. A lost gift returns with ecstatic suddenness. A theatrical evening climaxes in a massacre. And finding god may be the prelude to losing everything else. Touching, slyly comic, and humming with cerebral suspense, Snow is of immense relevance to our present moment.
Little Bee By Chris Cleave
Sarah Summers is enjoying a holiday on a Nigerian beach when a young girl named Little Bee crashes irrevocably into her life. All it takes is a brief and horrifying moment of crisis,a terrifying scene that no reader will forget. Afterwards, Sarah and Little Bee might expect never to see each other again. But Little Bee finds Sarah´s husband´s wallet in the sand, and smuggles herself on board a cargo vessel with his address in mind. She spends two years in detention in England before making her way to Sarah´s house, with what will prove to be devastating timing.
Chapter by chapter, alternating between Little Bee´s voice and Sarah´s, Chris Cleavewholly and caringly portrays two very different women trying to cope with events they´d never imagined. Little Bee is experiencing all the fullness and emptiness of the rich world for the first time, and her observations are hopeful, charming and piercing: Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl, she says: Everyone would be pleased to see me coming. Sarah is more cynical and disheartened, a successful magazine editor trying to find meaning in the face of turmoil at home and work.
As the story develops, however, we learn about what matters most to her, including her fierce, protective love for her funny little son (From the Spring of 2007 until the end of that long summer when Little Bee came to live with us,Sarah says, my son removed his Batman costume only at bathtimes.). Sarah is trying to find herself as much as Little Bee is, and, unexpectedly, each character discovers a ray of hope in the other. What follows when Little Bee comes back into Sarah´s life is a powerful story of reconciliation and healing, but it is mixed in with a generous helping of satire about the daily difficulties of modern life.
This is a novel about important issues, from refugee policy to the devastating effects of violence, but more than that, it does something only great fiction can:Little Beeteaches us what it is like to live through experiences most of us think of only as far off disasters in the news. As ever, the author says it best: It´s an uplifting, thrilling, universal human story, and I just worked to keep it simple. One brave African girl; one brave Western woman. What if one just turned up on the other´s doorstep one misty morning and asked, Can you help? And what if that help wasn´t just a one way street?
Benny and Shrimp By Katrina Mazetti
An international sensation, this addictively readable tale asks the question: Why is it so impossible to get a relationship between two middle-aged misfits to work? The answer lies in the story of Shrimp, a young widowed librarian with a sharp intellect and a home so tidy that her jam jars are in alphabetical order; Benny, a gentle, overworked milk farmer who fears becoming the villages Old Bachelor; and an unlikely love that should not be as complicated as it seems. Reminiscent of the works of Carol Shields, this quirky, humorous, beautifully told novel breathes new life into the age-old conundrum that is love.
Water For Elephants By Sara Gruen
A novel of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world circa 1932. When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there that he meets Marlena, the beautiful young star of the equestrian act, who is married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. He also meets Rosie, an elephant who seems untrainable until he discovers a way to reach her.--From publisher description. a race to thwart a doomed Highlands uprising ...and in a desperate fight to save both the child and the man she loves....
Dragonfly in Amber By Diane Gabaldon
From the author of Outlander... a magnificent epic that once again sweeps us back in time to the drama and passion of 18th-century Scotland...
For twenty years Claire Randall has kept her secrets. But now she is returning with her grown daughter to Scotland´s majestic mist-shrouded hills. Here Claire plans to reveal a truth as stunning as the events that gave it birth: about the mystery of an ancient circle of standing stones ...about a love that transcends the boundaries of time ...and about James Fraser, a Scottish warrior whose gallantry once drew a young Claire from the security of her century to the dangers of his ....
Now a legacy of blood and desire will test her beautiful copper-haired daughter, Brianna, as Claire´s spellbinding journey of self-discovery continues in the intrigue-ridden Paris court of Charles Stuart ...in a race to thwart a doomed Highlands uprising ...and in a desperate fight to save both the child and the man she loves....
NIne Dragons By Michael Connelly
Harry Bosch is assigned a homicide call in South L.A. that takes him to Fortune Liquors, where the Chinese owner has been shot to death behind the counter in an apparent robbery.
Joined by members of the department´s Asian Crime Unit, Bosch relentlessly investigates the killing and soon identifies a suspect, a Los Angeles member of a Hong Kong triad. But before Harry can close in, he gets the word that his young daughter Maddie, who lives in Hong Kong with her mother, is missing.
Bosch drops everything to journey across the Pacific to find his daughter. Could her disappearance and the case be connected? With the stakes of the investigation so high and so personal, Bosch is up against the clock in a new city, where nothing is at it seems.
Have A Little Faith By Mitch Albom
New York Times-bestselling author Albom goes back to his nonfiction roots with a timely, moving, and inspiring look at faith--not just who believes, but why--prompted by his search for the right words to eulogize a beloved rabbi.
Cry Wolf By Tami Hoagy
The scream heard by no one is the deadliest.
In the rural parishes of Louisiana´s French Triangle, young women are disappearing one by one, only to turn up on the banks of the bayou, strangled and cast aside where they are sure to be found. But there is one trophy the killer prizes above all others, one woman who must be silenced forever...
Attorney Laurel Chandler did not come back to Bayou Breaux to seek justice. That once burning obsession had destroyed her credibility, her career, her marriage and nearly her sanity. But when a ruthless predator strikes too close to home, she´s lured into a perverse game from which there may be no escape. Once before, Laurel´s cries against a monstrous evil went unanswered. Who will listen now?
Loving Frank By Nancy Horan
I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.
So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.
In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America´s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney´s profound influence on Wright.
Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan´s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah´s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel´s stunning conclusion.
Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.
Away By Amy Bloom
A Russian Jewish woman´s struggles to survive in America, then recapture the past brutally stolen from her, are recorded with eloquent compression in this striking second novel from NBA nominee Bloom (Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude, 2002, etc.).In a brisk narrative of the events of two crowded years (1924 and 1926), we encounter immigrant Lillian Leyb working as a seamstress on New York´s Lower East Side, and becoming mistress to both theater owner Reuben Burstein and his homosexual son Meyer (a popular matinee idol).
Lillian´s stoicism masks the terror that haunts her in recurring dreams of the massacre of her family by goyim revenging themselves on Jews sharing the meager resources of their village (Turov) and of the reported subsequent death of her beloved daughter Sophie. When another relative newly arrived in America reports that Sophie lives (having been rescued by a family that moved on to Siberia), Lillian embarks on a complex pilgrimage that takes her to Seattle and points north. She survives being robbed and beaten, bonds with a resourceful black prostitute, is sent for her own safety to a women´s work farm by the one man (widowed constable Arthur Gilpin) who seems not to have sexual designs on her, then makes her way across the Yukon to the Alaskan coast, encountering a refugee exiled following an accidental killing, John Bishop, who will be either her last best hope of finding Sophie or the alternative to a life of ceaseless wandering and suffering.
Summary doesn´t do justice to this compact epic´s richness of episode and characterization, nor to the exemplary skill with which Bloom increases her story´s resonance through dramatic foreshadowing of what lies ahead for her grifters and whores and romantic visionaries and stubborn, hard-bitten adventurers.Echoes of Ragtime, Cold Mountain and Irving Howe´s World of Our Fathers, in an amazingly dense, impressively original novel.
Sister Carrie By Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser´s first and perhaps most accessible novel, Sister Carrie I is an epic of urban life - the story of an innocent heroine adrift in an indifferent city. When small-town girl Carrie Meeber sets out for Chicago, she is equipped with nothing but a few dollars, a certain unspoiled beauty and charm, and a pitiful lack of preparation for the complex moral choices she will face.
The Sari Shop Widow By Shobhan Bantwal
ungent curry sweet fried onions incense colorful beads lush fabrics. Shobhan Bantwal´s compelling new novel is set on the streets of Edison, New Jersey´s Little India, where a young businesswoman rediscovers the magic of love and family
Since becoming a widow at age twenty seven, Anjali Kapadia has devoted herself to transforming her parents´ sari shop into a chic boutique, brimming with exquisite jewelry and clothing. Now, ten years later, it stands out like a proud maharani amid Edison´s bustling Little India. But when Anjali learns the shop is on the brink of bankruptcy, she feels her world unraveling
To the rescue comes Anjali´s wealthy, dictatorial Uncle Jeevan and his business partner, Rishi Shah a mysterious Londoner, complete with British accent, cool gray eyes, and skin so fair it makes it hard to believe he´s Indian. Rishi´s cool, foreign demeanor triggers distrust in Anjali and her mother. But for Anjali, he also stirs something else, a powerful attraction she hasn´t felt in a decade. And the feeling is mutual
Love disappointed Anjali once before and she´s vowed to live without it though Rishi is slowly melting her resolve and, as the shop regains its footing, gaining her trust. But when a secret from Rishi´s past is revealed, Anjali must turn to her family and her strong cultural upbringing to guide her in finding the truth
The Killer Angels By Michael Shaana
MY FAVORITE HISTORICAL NOVEL, A superb recreation of the Battle of Gettysburg, but its real importance is its insight into what the war was about, and what it meant.
James M. McPherson, Author of Battle Cry of Freedom
In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation´s history, two armies fought for two dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life.
Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Shattered futures, forgotten innocence, and crippled beauty were also the casualties of war.
The Killer Angels is unique, sweeping, unforgettable--a dramatic re-creation of the battleground for America´s destiny.
REMARKABLE A BOOK THAT CHANGED MY LIFE . . . I had never visited Gettysburg, knew almost nothing about that battle before I read the book, but here it all came alive.
Ken Burns, Filmmaker, The Civil War
One Thousand White Women: The journals of May Dodd By Jim Fergus
One Thousand White Women begins with May Dodd´s journey west, into the unknown. Yet the unknown is a far better fate than the life she left behind: committed to an insane asylum by her blueblood family for the crime of loving a man beneath her station, May finds that her only hope of freedom is to participate in a secret government program whereby women from the civilized world become the brides of Cheyenne warriors.
What follows is the story of May´s breathtaking adventures: her brief, passionate romance with the gallant young army captain John Bourke; her marriage to the great chief Little Wolf; and her conflict of being caught between two worlds, loving two men, living two lives.
City of Thieves By David Benioff
A writer visits his retired grandparents in Florida to document their experience during the infamous siege of Leningrad. His grandmother wont 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. Hes 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 daughters 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.
