These titles are highly recommended and were a great inspiration in writing this book:

• The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad     by Harrison E. Salisbury
  By all accounts, this is the definitive history of the Siege of Leningrad. Salisbury – a Russian scholar, reporter, and historian – fills his book with the stories of survivors and memories of the dead.
• Blockade Diary     by Lidiya Ginzburg
  Published forty years after the Siege, this work of ‘documentary fiction’ celebrates the intellectual resilience of the Russian people.
• Leningrad Under Siege     by Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin
  First-hand accounts of the worst days of the blockade.
• Writing the Siege of Leningrad     by Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina
  A collection of diaries that describes the lives of ordinary women during the Siege.
• Shurik: A Story of the Siege of Leningrad     by Kyra Ptrovskaya Wayne
  A young nurse saves an orphan boy during the Siege. Based on the author’s experiences.
• Siege and Survival: The Odyssey of a Leningrader     by Elena Skrjabina
  One woman’s devastating account of survival, escape, and loss.
• Leningrad: State of Siege     by Michael Jones
  Stories from both the civilian and military points of view.
• St Petersburg: A Cultural History     by Solomon Volkov
  A fascinating history of the cultural influence of the city and its artists, including Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Balanchine, and Shostakovich.
• Cinema and Soviet Society: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin     by Peter Kenez
  Kenez shows how the Soviet film industry responded to the political and social currents following the revolution, including the imposition of Socialist Realism, the relative freedoms during World War II, and the cultural stagnation of the late Stalinist era.

• The Siege     by Helen Dunmore
  Two love stories unfold and intertwine as ordinary people struggle amidst the tragedy of the Siege.
• Ice Road     by Gillian Slovo
  A novel that follows a Leningrad family’s story from the terror of the mid 1930’s through to the Siege. Beautifully realized.
• City of Thieves     by David Benioff
  During the Siege, two condemned prisoners are sent on an unlikely mission that takes them through the dying city.
• The End of Sorrow     by J.V. Love
  An inspired examination of faith, survival, and even a kind of optimism, in the face of evil.
• The Silent Angel     by Heinrich Böll
  If Günter Grass is the magical surrealist of post-WWII German literature, Heinrich Böll is its conscience.
• The First Circle    by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  Solzhenitsyn examines the atmosphere of Stalinist terror through the lives of a group of scientists and their prison/laboratory. Who will retain their humanity in this first circle of Hell?
• Petersburg    by Andrei Bely
  Bely paints a vivid portrait of St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1905, full of chaos and intrigue. His city, like Joyce’s Dublin, bursts with life and eccentric characters, and his elliptical prose has the same hypnotic effect.