Lost Souls of Leningrad

July 1, 2022

DEBUT The 1941 siege of Leningrad has fascinated novelists time and again. This debut historical novel was inspired by Parry's longstanding interest in Russia. Her heroines are teenage Yelena and her widowed grandmother, Sofya. They face mortal perils as Hitler assaults the heart of Russia. Starvation is inevitable as food depots are bombed and winter arrives. The women are buoyed by the love of their sweethearts. Sofya's lover is an admiral, but she has kept an immense secret from him for decades. Yelena's young lover drives in the convoys that supply the city from Lake Ladoga. Sofya and Yelena perform heroic deeds but also bad acts as they struggle to survive. With the Russian attack on Ukraine fresh in the imagination of readers, the wartime horrors of the siege and the emotional toll on the victims ring true. Parry has transformed her impressive research into a vigorous story of how love vanquishes despair. VERDICT Like the novels of Helen Dunmore, David Benioff, and others, Parry's work covers appalling agonies. There is an O. Henry quality in the revelation of an amazing connection among the characters. Readers of Ruta Sepetys's Between Shades of Gray and Salt to the Sea will enjoy the action focused on the teenager.--Barbara Conaty

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

A Russian family struggles through World War II in Parry's debut historical novel. In January 1941, Soviet widow Sofya Karavayeva is first-chair violinist at the prestigious Leningrad Philharmonic, and she lives with her son, Aleksandr; daughter-in-law, Katya; and beloved teenage granddaughter, Yelena, in the city. After Aleksandr is arrested by the Soviet secret police and sent to a labor camp, Katya is kicked out of the Communist Party and put to work in a factory, and Sofya is demoted to a position with the Radio Committee Orchestra. Grandmother and granddaughter are safe, however, and soon, each finds love: Sofya with her former lover Vasili Antonov, a navy admiral and recent widower who's secretly the father of her son, Aleksandr; and Yelena with Pavel Chernov, a handsome peer who, like her grandmother, plays violin. When Nazi Germany attacks the Soviet Union that summer, the men are called to fight for their country while the women struggle on the home front, hoarding food, lining up for dwindling rations each day, and eventually taking in two young children, sweet Alyosha and spirited Sasha, whose parents have been lost to war. Both Vasili and Pavel are constantly exposed to life-threatening danger, while Sofya and Yelena struggle to stay alive in a once-grand city now almost completely depleted of resources. In an author's note, Parry says that she was motivated to write this novel due to what she saw as a lack of Eastern European representation in World War II narratives, and the result is a well-researched work that incorporates real-life historical figures, such as navy commissars, orchestra conductors, and journalists, as well as fully realized fictional characters with difficulties and triumphs of their own. Although the slow-paced novel tends to get bogged down in abundant details, sometimes to the point of repetition, it remains a compelling story, effectively told through the alternating perspectives of Sofya, Yelena, Pavel, and Vasili. A thoroughly researched and sensitively written wartime drama.

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