City of Thieves

City of Thieves is a 2008 novel by David Benioff and is framed as a story told to him by his grandfather about one week of the war. The narration belongs to Lev Beniov, a Jewish teenager in the besieged city of Leningrad in the winter of 1941 and 1942, where food has almost run out and the streets are full of people who have died in them.

Lev is arrested for taking a parachute from a German body and is put in a cell with Nikolai Vlasov, a cheerful and handsome deserter. Before they are shot, an NKVD colonel offers them a bargain: a dozen eggs for his daughter's wedding cake. The hunt that follows is a journey through ruins, a countryside held by the Germans and the wreckage of a city that no longer works.

The friendship between the two men grows against cold, hunger and the risk of being caught behind the lines, and much of the book's humour comes from Kolya treating an impossible task as an adventure. Benioff keeps the camera close to the pair and lets the siege supply the pressure rather than explaining it.