As they suffered during the siege of Leningrad I had to get a blanket to put around me while I read (and some toast to eat!), so strong was Dunmore’s evocation of the cold and the hunger.

Only one other book has made me feel chilled to the bone while reading it during a hot Australian summer, and that was The left Hand of Darkness.

I would say she is far more than a safe pair of hands, although that description does resonate about a few other authors I can think of!

Great blog!

http://tomcatintheredroom.wordpress.com/

Kimbofo: She is what I would call a “polished” writer, so I could see where some instructors would find her a good example — particularly if they had a class inclined to confusing, run-on paragraphs and sentences. I too wonder about both this and the Dunmore on the list, mainly because the first novels attracted limited attention (I can’t help but wonder if one or two judges are playing a version of “catch up” with these listings, as both books are weak). Pat Barker did win the Booker for The Ghost Road, which was volume three in the Regeneration trilogy (and the weakest of the three for my money), but I think in that case it really was for all three books. And Amitav Ghosh did get nominated for Sea of Poppies a couple years ago, the first in an anticipated trilogy.

Isabel: There isn’t much “cold” in this one, so I think you might find more suitable “summer reads”. I’d check out the Solzhenitsyn’s for more useful Stalin reading.

You can read my review.

The mother died before the war started, and the father survived a bit into the Siege.

I don’t know much about Stalin, so I might start with this Dunmore novel next summer.

I find it interesting that two books on the Booker longlist are effectively sequels — the Dunmore and the Alan Warner. I guess it’s not unheard of because one of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose trilogy made the cut a few years back, but it does seem unusual to me that books that are part of a series are considered for this prize, because surely to get the full effect of a series you need to read them all…?

One song was about keeping moving so as not to freeze to death in the Siberian cold, the rest mercifully escapes me.

This would probably have been better had you read its prequel, though I suspect you wouldn’t have been any more excited by it. I actually wonder how much it benefits it to be Bookered in this way. In the normal course those who’d enjoyed the previous book would seek this one out and Dunmore would have people reading her who really wanted to. Now it’s getting a kind of exposure that (like Child 44) may not be entirely to its benefit.