The Bronze Horseman

The Bronze Horseman is a historical novel by the writer Paullina Simons, published in 2000 and the first book of a trilogy.

It begins on the day the German invasion of the Soviet Union begins and stays with the Metanov family in Leningrad as the city is encircled, its food supply cut and its winter arrives. The family shares one room in a communal apartment with their parents and twin brother, and the household's arrangements are the ordinary ones of the time: queues, ration cards, a stove used for everything, and the slow arithmetic by which a family works out who can be fed. Tatiana is the one who goes out to buy what there is to buy and the one who notices what the adults are pretending not to know, and the novel follows her and Alexander through a relationship that cannot be acknowledged, because he belongs to her sister. Simons writes the city as a place of palaces and boulevards that still remembers being St Petersburg, and she sets the love story against the siege rather than away from it. The book is dedicated in part to the author's grandparents, who survived Russia's twentieth century; it was followed by two further novels about the same couple.