City of Thieves

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Overview

From the critically acclaimed author of The 25th Hour, a captivating novel about war, courage, survival — and a remarkable friendship that ripples across a lifetime.

During the Nazis’ brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested for looting and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, 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 Soviet colonel to use in his daughter’s wedding cake. In a city cut off from all supplies and suffering unbelievable deprivation, Lev and Kolya embark on a hunt through the dire lawlessness of Leningrad and behind enemy lines to find the impossible.

By turns insightful and funny, thrilling and terrifying, City of Thieves is a gripping, cinematic World War II adventure and an intimate coming-of-age story with an utterly contemporary feel for how boys become men.

What People Are Saying

Dear David,

I had the immense pleasure of reading City of Thieves in one sitting on a flight from San Francisco to Paris last week. I may have looked up from the pages a grand total of three times. I was riveted and utterly trapped. And when I was done, just as we were approaching De Gaulle, I already missed your voice and the company of Lev, Kolya, and Vika.

What continues to amaze me about your writing, David, is that I cannot think of any other contemporary writer whose craft and skill boasts such diversity. Nor can I think of anyone out there who does it all with such aplomb, intelligence, and heart.

So many scenes from City of Thieves have been imprinted on my mind. The boy, Vadim, clutching Darling. The sad and darkly funny fate of Darling. The shocking scene at the cannibals’ lair. The field of dead dogs. Zoya’s horrible fate (which brought to my mind stories of how militiamen in Kabul killed civilians with similar savagery). The relentless suspense of the chess match with the Einsatz commander. There was something at stake on each page and the story never once failed to surprise, thrill, or move me. Your prose is graceful in a very effortless way. This book is quite an accomplishment, David, and should go down as one of the great contemporary war novels. But of course, it is much more than a war novel. I admire and envy what you have done. We had to wait six years for your second novel and I only hope that you do not wait as long next time to write another.

At any rate, you should be very proud of this book.

Yours,
Khaled

(A letter to the author from Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns)

Editorial Reviews

Thomas Meaney

City of Thieves is a coming-of-age story brilliantly amplified by its war-torn backdrop…At times Lev and Kolya seem too free from the strictures of Soviet ideology: They each come equipped with an improbably deep understanding of their society. But for the most part, they and the minor characters satisfyingly inhabit the historical wreckage, and Kolya and Abendroth are especially memorable. But Benioff's finest achievement in City of Thieves has been to banish all possible pretensions from his novel, which never wears its research on its sleeve, and to deliver a rough-and-tumble tale that clenches humor, savagery and pathos squarely together on the same page.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Author and screenwriter Benioff follows up The 25th Hourwith this hard-to-put-down novel based on his grandfather's stories about surviving WWII in Russia. Having elected to stay in Leningrad during the siege, 17-year-old Lev Beniov is caught looting a German paratrooper's corpse. The penalty for this infraction (and many others) is execution. But when Colonel Grechko confronts Lev and Kolya, a Russian army deserter also facing execution, he spares them on the condition that they acquire a dozen eggs for the colonel's daughter's wedding cake. Their mission exposes them to the most ghoulish acts of the starved populace and takes them behind enemy lines to the Russian countryside. There, Lev and Kolya take on an even more daring objective: to kill the commander of the local occupying German forces. A wry and sympathetic observer of the devastation around him, Lev is an engaging and self-deprecating narrator who finds unexpected reserves of courage at the crucial moment and forms an unlikely friendship with Kolya, a flamboyant ladies' man who is coolly reckless in the face of danger. Benioff blends tense adventure, a bittersweet coming-of-age and an oddly touching buddy narrative to craft a smart crowd-pleaser. (May)

More Reviews (3) Fewer Reviews

Library Journal

Looking for the feel-good World War II book of the year? This tale of two miscreants in Soviet Leningrad might be the one, as Lev and Kolya bumble their way toward locating a dozen eggs for a stern Soviet colonel who needs them for his daughter's wedding cakes. The city is at the gates of starvation (achingly portrayed in realistic detail), so the boys set out into the enemy-occupied countryside. Delivering the eggs will release them from their death sentences, as Lev was caught looting the body of a downed German paratrooper and Kolya deserted his unit to visit girlfriends. Coming upon partisan cadres and Germans, they find little success in their perilous saga. With deftly sly humor, respect for the agony of warfare, and dialog that elevates the boys-to-men story beyond its typical male ribaldry, this second novel (after The 25th Hour) by screenwriter Benioff (The Kite Runner) deserves a bright spotlight in most libraries to attract readers young and old to its compelling pages.
—Barbara Conaty

Kirkus Reviews

Novelist and screenwriter Benioff's glorious second novel (The 25th Hour, 2000) is a wild action-packed quest, and much else besides: a coming-of-age story, an odd-couple tale and a juicy footnote to the historic World War II siege of Leningrad. It's New Year's Eve, 1941, and Lev Beniov is alone in Leningrad. (Note that last name: This novel was sparked by tape-recorded memories of author Benioff's grandfather.) The 17-year-old's mother and sister were evacuated before the siege began in September; his father, a respected poet, was "removed" by the NKVD in 1937. Lev's real troubles begin when a German paratrooper, frozen to death, lands on his street. Lev deserts his firefighter's post, steals the German's knife, is arrested by soldiers and jailed. His cellmate is 20-year-old Kolya, a boastful Cossack deserter, dazzlingly handsome in contrast to scrawny Lev, who hates his telltale big nose (he's half-Jewish); their initial hostility turns into the closest of bonds. Sparing their lives, for now, NKVD Colonel Grechko gives them a near-impossible assignment in this starving city: five days to find a dozen eggs for his daughter's wedding cake. There's nothing doing on the black market. Then Kolya hears of a poultry collective . . . behind German lines. That's where they must go, decides Kolya, and Benioff makes his boundless self-confidence entirely credible. Over half the novel happens in enemy territory. Lev and Kolya stumble on a farmhouse where four pretty Russian girls are being kept as sex slaves by a Nazi death squad. (The connection between sex and death is a major theme.) The slave-owners are killed by Russian partisans, one of whom is the deadly sniper Vika, a young tomboy whosteals Lev's heart. Despite a "parade of atrocities," the pace will keep your adrenaline pumping right up to the climactic chess game between Lev and a fiendish Nazi officer. This gut-churning thriller will sweep you along and, with any luck, propel Benioff into bestseller land. Agent: Tracy Fisher and Raffaella De Angelis/William Morris

The Barnes & Noble Review

David Benioff has made a specialty out of crafting characters who achieve some measure of success -- fame, fortune, athletic prowess, or beauty -- but who simultaneously see through it. They are haunted by the compromises they've made to get to the top. A screenwriter, Benioff is best known in the literary world for his 2000 novel, The 25th Hour (later filmed by Spike Lee, with Benioff's script). That book featured a handsome New York city drug dealer named Montgomery Brogan -- a working-class boy forced to appear tougher than he felt -- who was whiling away his last hours as a free man before heading off to a notoriously brutal upstate prison. Monty was an antihero, but Benioff made the reader root for him as a self-aware cog in a flawed universe.

Similarly, in the short stories of When the Nines Roll Over, Benioff presented characters such as Tabachnik, a brilliant A&R man ambivalent about selling out his artists, and June, a prosaic waitress who knows getting her big break as an actress means leaving her pure-hearted boyfriend. Benioff's characters were smart but not happy, because their intelligence forced them to scorn easy consolations.

The characters in City of Thieves, set during the 1941 siege of Leningrad, are something different. They are idealists in spite of their own misgivings about the world; idealists in spite of their pronounced suffering. Benioff makes his hero a true underdog -- a bright but gawky 17-year-old named Lev who is a self-described "runt from birth." Lev has a big nose, "skin scribbled with acne," and "the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews, two of the gloomiest tribes in the world." Lev is skeptical without being jaded. This is not because he hasn't had enough experience -- though he is a shy virgin, Benioff makes clear that Lev has seen and heard more by the age of 17 than most people will in a lifetime, including the "disappearance" of his father from the literary magazine where he worked -- but because disillusionment would require reaching a level of comfort impossible in a war-starved city, where the focus must be on daily acts of survival.

Benioff brings this sense of destitution to vivid life, depicting the autumn wind that blows only the shutter hinges of buildings, since the shutters themselves have been torn down for firewood. "Every wood sign, the slats of the park benches, the floorboards of shattered buildings -- all gone and burning in someone's stove." The rationed bread is so hard that people break their teeth trying to chew it. In a black market area where general's wives and party members once traded their jewelry and silverware for food (" 'So eat your silverware,' " the peasants say, if anyone objects to the price), men are now selling glasses of dirt. "Badayev Mud," it's called, "taken from the ground under the bombed food warehouses and packed with melted sugar." Another vendor sells "library candy, made from tearing the covers off of books, peeling off the binding glue, boiling it down, and reforming it into bars you could wrap in paper."

Lev chooses to remain in Piter (the name "every native used, but banned from all Soviet text because 'Saint Petersburg' was a czar's arrogance") when his mother and sister are evacuated, shortly before the Germans encircle the city. He does so out of an adolescent's desire for adventure, "flooded with a belief in my own heroic destiny." Volunteering as a firefighter on the roof of his building at night, he mans water buckets, sand, iron tongs, and shovels while he and other residents search the sky for bombs. When Lev abandons his post to loot a German paratrooper's body for food, breaking a strict curfew, he is arrested and placed in a prison cell with a man named Kolya, a beautiful Cossack with high cheekbones and hay-blond hair, eyes "blue enough to please any Aryan." Kolya is a smooth-talking swindler accused of deserting his Red Army unit. His life, like Lev's, is temporarily spared only because a ruthless NKVD colonel needs help with a particular task: finding a dozen eggs, within the next five days, to make the cake for his daughter's wedding. "My men say there are no eggs in Leningrad," the iron-faced colonel informs Lev and Kolya, "but I believe there is everything in Leningrad, even now. I just need the right fellows to find it. A pair of thieves."

It is a truism of the adventure story or quest narrative that the object to be attained (the Holy Grail, the hidden treasure, the power-giving rings) is of less importance than the journey itself, which forges the hero's character. In City of Thieves, the quest for a dozen eggs takes Lev and Kolya behind German lines in the devastated countryside, brings them into contact with dangerous partisans and ravenous cannibals, leads to their capture and the murder of several high-ranking Nazis -- but the eggs serve primarily as a means to the book's larger end, which is showing how a friendship forms between the insecure Lev and the wily Kolya. Their odd-couple banter, which consists primarily of Kolya's boasting of his sexual conquests and Lev's doubtful rejoinders, does not contain a single false note. As befits an accomplished screenwriter, Benioff moves the plot along with a suspenseful celerity. His prose is scrupulously, almost unnervingly excised of inessential detail -- the starkness of Hemingway crossed with the authenticity of Richard Price.

There are times when this world feels too seamlessly rendered, the loose ends tied up too neatly when what one wants is some enduring mystery, the ambiguity associated with more complex literature. But the novel Benioff has written is one where characters poke holes in the notion of artistic greatness, and rightly so. One of its best scenes occurs when Kolya and Lev hear a pianist playing in a dark house, on a deserted Leningrad street. There are shells falling off in the distance and the music is strange and unfathomable. It is a song that Lev, who knows all of Mahler and can "identify any of Chopin's twenty-seven etudes after hearing a few bars," has never heard. "It was music for wartime," he thinks, and "when it ended, something seemed wrong: the performance was too good to go unacknowledged, the performer too skilled to accept no applause. For a long moment we were silent, staring up at the dark windows." Lev believes it could be Shostakovich himself, but Kolya spits on the sidewalk at the thought.

"They evacuated Shostakovich three months ago," he says. The ordinary people -- the ones who have yet to distinguish themselves -- are all that remain, and they must fend for themselves. --Andrea Walker

Andrea Walker is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker. Her reviews have appeared in Bookforum, The Hartford Courant, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780670018703
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Publication date: 5/15/2008
Pages: 272
Product dimensions: 6.00 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

David Benioff was born and raised in New York City. He adapted his first novel, The 25th Hour, into the feature film directed by Spike Lee. With many other screenplays to his credit, he is also the writer of the forthcoming films, "Brothers" and "X-Men Origins: Wolverine". Stories from his critically acclaimed collection When the Nines Roll Over appeared in Best New American Voices and The Best Nonrequired American Reading. His latest novel is City of Thieves. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

Read an Excerpt

You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold. When we slept, if we slept, we dreamed of the feasts we had carelessly eaten seven months earlier—all that buttered bread, the potato dumplings, the sausages—eaten with disregard, swallowing without tasting, leaving great crumbs on our plates, scraps of fat. In June of 1941, before the Germans came, we thought we were poor. But June seemed like paradise by winter.

At night the wind blew so loud and long it startled you when it stopped; the shutter hinges of the burnt-out café on the corner would quit creaking for a few ominous seconds, as if a predator neared and the smaller animals hushed in terror. The shutters themselves had been torn down for firewood in November. There was no more scrap wood in Leningrad. Every wood sign, the slats of the park benches, the floorboards of shattered buildings—all gone and burning in someone's stove. The pigeons were missing, too, caught and stewed in melted ice from the Neva. No one minded slaughtering pigeons. It was the dogs and cats that caused trouble. You would hear a rumor in October that someone had roasted the family mutt and split it four ways for supper; we'd laugh and shake our heads, not believing it, and also wondering if dog tasted good with enough salt— there was still plenty of salt, even when everything else ran out we had salt. By January the rumors had become plain fact. No one but the best connected could still feed a pet, so the pets fed us.

There were two theories on the fat versus the thin. Some said those who were fat before the war stood a better chance of survival: a week without food would not transform a plump man into a skeleton. Others said skinny people were more accustomed to eating little and could better handle the shock of starvation. I stood in the latter camp, purely out of self-interest. I was a runt from birth. Big-nosed, black-haired, skin scribbled with acne—let's admit I was no girl's idea of a catch. But war made me more attractive. Others dwindled as the ration cards were cut and cut again, halving those who looked like circus strongmen before the invasion. I had no muscle to lose. Like the shrews that kept scavenging while the dinosaurs toppled around them, I was built for deprivation.

So I was too young for the army but old enough to dig anti-tank ditches by day and guard the roofs by night. Manning my crew were my friends from the 5th floor, Vera Osipovna, a talented cellist, and the redheaded Antokolsky twins, whose only known talent was an ability to fart in harmony. In the early days of the war we had smoked cigarettes on the roof, posing as soldiers, brave and strong and square-chinned, scanning the skies for the enemy. By the end of December there were no cigarettes in Leningrad, at least none made with tobacco. A few desperate souls crushed fallen leaves, rolled them in paper and called them Autumn Lights, claiming the right leaves provided a decent smoke, but in the Kirov, far from the nearest standing tree, this was never an option. We spent our spare minutes hunting rats, who must have thought the disappearance of the city's cats was the answer to all their ancient prayers, until they realized there was nothing left to eat in the garbage.

We had a little radio on the roof with us. On New Year's Eve we listened to the Spassky chimes in Moscow playing the Internationale. Vera had found half an onion somewhere; she cut it into four pieces on a plate smeared with sunflower oil. When the onion was gone we mopped up the remaining oil with our ration bread. Ration bread did not taste like bread. It did not taste like food. After the Germans bombed the Badayev grain warehouses, the city bakeries got creative. Everything that could be added to the recipe without poisoning people was added to the recipe. The entire city was starving, no one had enough to eat, and still, everyone cursed the bread, the sawdust flavor, how hard it got in the cold. People broke their teeth trying to chew it. Even today, even when I've forgotten the faces of people I loved, I can still remember the taste of that bread.

Half an onion and a 125-gram loaf of bread split four ways—this was a decent meal. We lay on our backs, wrapped in blankets, watching the air raid blimps on their long tethers drifting in the wind, listening to the radio's metronome. When there was no music to play or news to report, the radio station transmitted the sound of a metronome, that endless tick-tick-tick letting us know the city was still unconquered, the Fascists still outside the gate. The broadcast metronome was Piter's beating heart, and the Germans never stilled it.

It was Vera who spotted the man falling from the sky. She shouted and pointed and we all stood to get a better look. One of the searchlights shone on a parachutist descending towards the city, his silk canopy a white tulip bulb above him.

“A Fritz,” said Oleg Antokolsky, and he was right, we could see the grey Luftwaffe uniform. Where had he come from? None of us had heard the sounds of aerial combat or the report of an AA gun. We hadn't heard a bomber passing overhead for close to an hour.

“Maybe it's started,” said Vera. For weeks we'd been hearing rumors that the Germans were preparing a massive paratrooper drop, a final raid to pluck the miserable thorn of Leningrad from their advancing army's backside. At any minute we expected to look up and see thousands of Nazis drifting toward the city, a snowstorm of white parachutes blotting out the sky, but dozens of searchlights slashed through the darkness and found no more enemies. There was only this one, and judging from the limpness of the body suspended from the parachute harness, he was already dead.

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The_Alternative

Posted September 5, 2009

more from this reviewer

City of Thieves by David Benioff

City of Thieves is a coming-of-age voyage (to find a dozen eggs no less) in the war torn city of Leningrad, Russia. It is the winter of 1941 and the German Army has besieged the city. Rations are non-existent, citizens are dying by the hundreds, and everyone lives in fear of being overrun by the enemy. They have no alternative but to fight for survival. Lev and Kolya, young teen-age Russians, are arrested, Lev for looting a dead paratrooper, and Kolya for desertion. With their arrests both are destined to take a short trip that ends with their backs poised against a wall brushed with blood. But before their execution in the face of a firing squad they are given a reprieve by the city's acting military commander. They are ordered on a mission to find a dozen eggs for the colonel's daughter's wedding cake. They are given less than a week to complete their task and their ration cards are confiscated. Without a means of obtaining food what else can they do but try and fulfill the task. But in a city that has resorted to cannibalism where could they possibly find what they search for? The story develops as the two young men head off in search of the prized components.

Based on the true-life adventures of Benioff's grandfather we are transported to a city that has fallen on the hardest of times. Starvation, desperation, and self-preservation are the only law in Leningrad and that image of desolation and destruction lays the groundwork for the rest of the story. The quest for eggs takes them to a private whore house in the woods, to Russian partisans in the rural outskirts of the city, and to a German military camp where the final stand-off is played over a chess set. Benioff explores the grief and indifference of the characters while they hide from snipers, infiltrate a line of captured prisoners and eventually find what they were looking for. Peace!

This is a true heart-rending story written with love, care and consideration. Well worth the read.

4 ½ stars out of 5

http://thealternativeone.blogspot.com/

8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
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Ashiya

Posted February 20, 2010

Can't Wait for the Movie!

Perhaps the finest work of historical fiction I have read in decades. The author draws the reader in via a slick bit of writing that sets the stage for a leap back to wartime St. Petersburg. There follows a development of characters that is truly exceptional. This is a book that hooks the reader in a fashion that moves from not wanting to put it down to can't put it down.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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ChristyLockstein

Posted May 16, 2009

The horror of war captured through the eyes of a teenage boy in Leningrad

City of Thieves by David Benioff is the fictionalized story of the author's grandfather's experiences in World War II Leningrad. Lev Beniov has remained in the city during the siege by the Germans, despite the evacuation of his mother and sister. Living in an apartment building with other teens, they've become a family of sorts, but when he is caught looting the body of a German paratrooper, Russian soldiers take him to prison to be executed. His cellmate for the evening is Kolya, a soldier accused of deserting his post. In the morning, instead of facing a firing squad, Lev and Kolya are ordered by a general to find a dozen eggs in five days time for his daughter's wedding cake. In a city that has resorted to eating the paste out of library books for the protein, this is a Herculean task, but if they don't succeed, the men will be hunted down by the general's men and lose their ration cards, either outcome meaning certain death. The two travel the city in the quest for eggs and come across horrific scenes of depravity along with startling compassion and generosity. Their quest for the eggs becomes something more, elevating and teaching Lev and Kolya about what it means to be human and to fight for something bigger than themselves.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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9519891

Posted August 27, 2011

My Gracious

This was such an exciting read; I couldnt put it down. I was hooked from beginning to end. Easily my favorite book on Earth. You are missing out if you dont read this book.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Ray_W

Posted February 24, 2010

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Very enteraining book!!!

It was a very good book. It is a work of fiction, but still has a lot of historical events that took place. The characters were very believeable and there was a good story line. I am trying to get my teenage kids to read the book, just so they can see what World War II might have been like in Russia. It had funny moments, a few scary/tight spot moments and even had a little romance in it. A very entertaining book.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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ReadMe003

Posted February 4, 2010

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Incredible Writing Style

David Benioff needs to write another book, as I'm impatiently waiting! City of Thieves was fabulous. I can't say enough about his writing style. Great character development, great storytelling that moves forward, humor and emotion often in the same sentence. He's incredible. After reading this, I grabbed his other books without even seeing what they were about. I can't get enough.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Sensitivemuse

Posted November 13, 2009

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Good balance of comedy and tragedy

This book has all the makings of a coming of age historical foreign movie (makes sense, the author is also a screenwriter). I can actually picture the movie in my head and watching it. It's something I would watch. It's both funny yet certain parts remind me of the horrors of war still thriving within the city. The story is told in the point of view of Lev who's young and stays behind while his mother and sister move away from the city. His father, is most likely dead, as he gets arrested and is never seen again. When he meets Kolya, the charming deserter who seems to have a tale for everything and has to say something every waking moment, they make a comical duo. Lev is very surly at first and is annoyed frequently by Kolya, who doesn't really care what he thinks of him and keeps on going with his little quirks and stories of his various romantic conquests and how he hasn't gone to the bathroom in a very long time.

I liked this book because of its' interesting mix of comedy and drama set in a rather serious and sombre setting. Come to think of it, I haven't even read a book set in World War II where there is comedy in it. In fact I think it's quite a rarity, yet this kind of rarity, and written and executed well, makes it a rare gem. I have to admit, I liked Kolya from the start. You could tell he was the comic relief of the duo here. He provided the light hearted side of the story and actually had very funny and interesting things to say. It was hard to like Lev. I don't know what to make of him. Surly, hard to like, easily angered (really all the makings of an angsty teenager) although on the other hand, he knew how to survive on the streets which had made him mature faster while Kolya was more of the child of this twosome. However towards the end of the book where Lev actually does grow up both mentally and physically, I started to rather respect him more as his character developed.

The things I didn't like about this book? well for starters, there were some very graphic and gruesome parts that aren't for the squeamish and some parts even made me squirm uncomfortably. Lev rather annoyed me because he wouldn't stop thinking as how Vika would look naked (and those moments increased towards the end of the book) it got annoying and stagnant. One other criticism, what happened to Kolya was rather predictable in the end. I figured that out at least before halfway of the novel. (Which is why I said it had all the makings of a great foreign movie).

Despite these faults, I enjoyed reading the book and following these two on their dangerous journey to find eggs. The whole finding eggs bit does make it comical but on the other hand it's mixed so well with the horr

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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jj1975

Posted August 30, 2009

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Outstanding

There's something about reading how so many people struggled during World War II, that gives you an appreciation for the smaller things in life. Like eggs! It may not be David Benioff's intention to evoke thought of your own vulnerability, but his story does. And does it well. I found myself feeling for the characters and wondering what it would be like to be Lev. To be thrust out of your comfort zone and into such dire circumstances. We all have a Kolya in our lives. That person we love to hate yet hate to love! Someone who, after all they put you through, can show you their weakness and you do nothing but tell them it'll be alright.
This story brought me to a place that I haven't been to in a long time and kept me there until it was over.
A very good read in my opinion. Worth checking out.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Awesomeness1

Posted June 15, 2009

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Darkly Funny

This dark comedy makes it mark with its origina, absurd plot: a teenage Jew and a Red Army deserter pair up on a mission to find a dozen eggs in a starving, barbaric city with their lives at stake. This novel has very memorable characters, with events to match. It will make you laugh, only to wipe the smile off your with the horrors on every page. A resonant novel to be read by all. Benioff holds nothing back.

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harstan

Posted March 20, 2009

more from this reviewer

Readers will want to join Kolya and Lev on their quest to find the Holy Grail: a dozen eggs.

During the Nazi siege of Leningrad, seventeen year old Lev Beniov remains in the city alone as his dad "officially" vanished several years earlier and his mom and sis were evacuated. However, he is unable to stay in hiding as he needs food, but he is caught looting. The Germans execute looters on the spot. Yet Nazi Colonel Grechko offers Lev and equally guilty twenty year old Russian army deserter Kolya a chance to live. They are to obtain twelve eggs in five days for his daughter's wedding cake; failure means death.

They quickly know the black market has nothing for sale. Thus the duet works their way behind the Nazi line as they assume nearby farms are their best bet. Lev and Kolya stumble onto a Nazi death squad sexually abusing Russian women and help the partisans kill the Nazi beasts. As they witness more atrocities, the unlikely duo becomes friends while Lev is attracted to kick-butt partisan sniper Vika.

This deep look at the atrocities of war stars a coming of age odd couple who forge a friendship out of surviving the abuses they encounter in spite of Kolya being a confident extrovert and Lev a self mocking introvert with the latter telling their story. The story line is fast-paced with plenty of action; much of which accentuates the abuses, carnage, and the scarcities the civilian population face. Readers will want to join Kolya and Lev on their quest to find the Holy Grail: a dozen eggs.

Harriet Klausner

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Anonymous

Posted September 17, 2008

City of Thieves

Not just another hotshot American novelist, David Benioff also has his hands dipped in the lucrative trade of Hollywood scriptwriting. Aside from adapting his own novel, The 25th Hour, into a Spike Lee film that starred Edward Norton, he wrote the screenplay for Troy and adapted Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner for the big screen. Perhaps that is why, reading his latest book, you get a sense of watching events unfold in a cinematic manner, with enough details about the protagonists to start casting actors in your mind. In the short prologue, Benioff snappily etches out a writer's relationship with his retired grandfather whom he is interviewing for a magazine article. Just enough hints are dropped here to draw you into the main story with the lure of discovering how this Russian Jew killed two Germans before he turned 18. In 1942, with Germany having begun its infamous siege of Leningrad (now St Petersburg), a 17-year-old Lev finds himself alone in a cut-off city, after his family fled to Vyazma. Caught by Russian authorities for theft, he is unexpectedly spared from punishment and instead given a task to undertake with a 20-year-old army deserter, Kolya - to bring back a dozen eggs for the wedding of a colonel's daughter. Now, in the chaotic, food-scarce city, this order is not easily accomplished by visiting the nearest grocer. Rather, it is a suicide mission that will take the duo into the treacherous countryside beyond enemy lines. The symbolism of theft hovers over the entire book - from the plundering invaders, to cannibalistic urban dwellers preying on children, to (as mentioned in passing conversation between the protagonists) the possibility of Shostakovich plagiarizing from Mahler. City Of Thieves is not only a poetic coming-of-age tale and a surrealistic odyssey filled with unnerving encounters and ironic outcomes. It is ultimately a heart-rending study on our rootedness to home, city and nation.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted May 20, 2012

Engaging about a dozen eggs?

One of the best books I have read this year a must read. The story of two young men and a mission to get a dozen egg to save there lives. The premise alone will get you hook and non-stop read through it to get to the end.
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Anonymous

Posted May 14, 2012

Let me preface this review by saying it has been several months

Let me preface this review by saying it has been several months since I have read this book. That being said however, City of Thieves was powerful enough to leave a lasting impression.

City of Thieves is narrated by the young, fictionalized grandfather of author David Benioff, Lev Beniov. Lev is arrested after looting a paratrooper. In prison, he meets up with the charming, charismatic Kolya who has just deserted his army unit. The two of them are given a reprieve of sorts if they can track down a dozen eggs in war torn Leningrad within a week.

Their mission takes them on harrowing adventures through a Dante-esque landscape. So harrowing in fact, that portions of the book are not for the faint of heart. Some scenes are down right grotesque and troubling, even for this jaded and hardened reader. However, they serve a purpose and only make the ending that much more poignant.

The ending reveals the brilliance and beauty of the title. Everyone is a thief in war torn Russia, from the bottom up.
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Anonymous

Posted April 13, 2012

Creative, Clever and Crude at times

The story and David Benioff's writing style kept my interest throughout the book. But I could have done without reading the crude sexual boyhood descriptions and I really dislike it when I am forced to read the "C" word when describing females, but luckily that wasn't too often. So aside from that, it was a good book.
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Anonymous

Posted April 10, 2012

Best book ever!!!!! Highly recommended

So I read the overview and it sounded like a good book, but I was wrong it wasn't just good it was like the top of the top of greatness of all books. I wouldn't recommend it if your in like elementary school cause it's got some adult stuff in it... If you know what I mean. But if your looking for a good book and can't find one then this is the book for you. You won't be disappointed , trust me I know!
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Anonymous

Posted February 29, 2012

quick read

Picked this up at the library this afternoon and I am halfway thru the book - easy reading; good characterization if a bit simplistic. I haven't read much about the siege of Leningrad but the scenes seem true to life and realistic; makes me wonder how Americans would have survived if war had reached our cities.
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Anonymous

Posted February 18, 2012

Great book

I couldnt put it down. I loved it!!
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Anonymous

Posted February 17, 2012

Great book

I love reading about Russia and this book is well written. I enjoyed the relationship between the 2main characters. I wish it were longer. I wanted to know more and for the story to continue. I would recommend this book. A short easy read.
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sharemare

Posted February 5, 2012

Okay, but inadequately developed characters

Simply stated, the book was readable, but that’s the best I can say for it. Despite its potential to be a gripping story, it was not. It did not draw me in and I was not engaged. I finished it because it is a book club selection. In the end, I did not give a hoot about the characters - not the mark of a great book.
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Anonymous

Posted December 21, 2011

Very good.

Enjoyed it... a diamond in the rough
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City of Thieves by David Benioff

Can't Wait for the Movie!

The horror of war captured through the eyes of a teenage boy in Leningrad

My Gracious

Very enteraining book!!!

Incredible Writing Style

Good balance of comedy and tragedy

Outstanding

Darkly Funny

Readers will want to join Kolya and Lev on their quest to find the Holy Grail: a dozen eggs.

City of Thieves

Engaging about a dozen eggs?

Let me preface this review by saying it has been several months

Creative, Clever and Crude at times

Best book ever!!!!! Highly recommended

quick read

Great book

Great book

Okay, but inadequately developed characters

Very good.