If City of Thieves seems to resemble a screenplay, that’s not surprising: Author David Benioff wrote the scripts for The Kite Runner and Troy, among other films. The book is a suspenseful buddy and coming-of-age story with incredible plot twists, an action-adventure tone, and a happy ending despite its many atrocities and tragedies. It takes place during the Nazi siege of Leningrad in World War II. Lev Beniov, age 17, stays behind in Leningrad when his mother and sister flee; his Jewish poet father has disappeared at the hands of the NKVD, the secret police. Lev steals a knife from the corpse of a German paratrooper and is apprehended for looting, a capital offense. But Lev and a 20-year-old army deserter who share his jail cell are going to be spared if they can find a dozen eggs for a colonel’s daughter’s wedding cake.
Of course, it’s an impossible mission: There are no eggs in Leningrad, where the besieged population is starving. After grizzly encounters in the city, Lev and his accomplice Kolya leave for the enemy-occupied countryside. Another escape from killers hooks them up with a group of Russian partisans, one of whom is a female sniper on whom Lev develops a crush. The adventure continues up to the chess match that Lev plays with a sadistic Nazi commander for life-or-death stakes.
Koyla, an irrepressible ladies man, supplies humor in between the horrors, expounding on literature, the state of his bowels, and — especially rankling to the virgin Lev — sex. But calamities make odd bedfellows, and Kolya earns Lev's trust and becomes his best friend.
The story of Lev Beniov (note the similarity to the author’s surname) may be that of the author's grandfather, although Benioff has made conflicting statements about that. If it is Benioff's grandfather's story, City of Thieves proves that truth can be stranger than fiction.
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