Wow, what an amazing book! Set in Leningrad during the 1940s. The city is under siege, surrounded by Germans, and the people are starving in the depths of a hard winter. Despite terrible losses, the city put together an orchestra to play Shostakovich's Leningrad symphony. This, then,  is the setting, but this book is about the people: Katya, who has lost her family, beautiful Lidiya whose determination holds together the people in her block, blind Dima with his passionate love of music, and his friend Vasya who keeps him alive, Trofim who doesn't fit in in the army, and popular Sasha who accepts people as they are but never gives away anything about himself, and they absolutely come to life in this exceptional book. The background of politics in Russia is skated over very lightly, but ever present. I did occasionally find the jumps in time a little difficult to follow. I absolutely loved this extremely well written book.

This will travel as my favourite book of 2024.

The ray:
Shepparm (UK)
estelle1806 (Ireland)
Fifna (Netherlands)
grovalskii (Germany)
Andrasthe (Austria)
Rach260 (Australia)
mathgirl40 (Canada)
djf1968 (USA)
39301 (USA)
valpete (USA)
dark-draco (UK)
Cross-patch (UK)

Posted to Shepparm. Enjoy! :)

Received today. Looking forward to reading it.

I enjoyed this book. There are some quite harrowing parts which made it hard going sometimes but it is very well written and the characters are believable. I was certainly left with the feeling of what happened next of how the main characters continued after the Symphony.

Now travelling on to Estelle 1806

Received and ready to be read, thank you.

Sorry about the delay in sending this book forward.
It was very difficult to get into it, I must have started it 3 times before being able to hold on to the stories and names. It was OK, very slow paced, so I found it hard to finish. However, I liked the style and it was emotional at times. Some characters were more interesting than others and I thought the music would have taken a larger part in the story. It would have been helpful to get translation notes for the non-Russian speakers.
Thanks for sharing, greenbadger.

Travelling to the next reader.

Please let us know when you release it again...

Bon voyage !

Arrived safely, thanks estelle1806!