Back in the seventies I spent a semester at Leningrad State University. A bus met us at the airport, loaded up us and our luggage, and took us, not to our dorm, but straight to the cemetery where the bulk of the victims of the siege are buried.   Acres and acres of graves.  But not in rows of individual graves.  The dead were layered in great trenches that were covered in mounds of earth when they filled up.

There were still a great many survivors of the siege in Leningrad at the time, middle-aged and elderly women, for the most part.  They were the ones who took long bus rides on Sundays to the few churches that were left open, or scolded young people for dropping gum wrappers on the street.  And you didn't even think of smart talking them.

So, this book spoke to me.  Marina's memories of 1941-42 are real.  More real, to her, than the time and place she now resides in.  But with a tinge of unreality as well, colored by sixty years of living past the war, or by starvation induced hallucinations during it.