(Sceptre, $27.99) This funny, tragic, historical buddy book is my favourite of the year so far. Funnily enough, I nearly didn’t bother with it because the blurb on the back begins: “During the Nazis’ brutal siege of Leningrad…” which frankly did not sound like my cup of tea. For whatever reason though, (probably hiding from the cold inside the book store) I kept reading.
Turns out it is not a gory blokes’ war story, but the charming, if undeniably brutal, tale of two young men thrown together in an unlikely search for a dozen eggs needed for a wedding cake. If they can find the eggs, the bride-tobe’s father – a powerful Russian colonel – tells them, they can keep their lives. A dozen eggs? It might not sound like much of a mission in a modern context but during that aforementioned siege of Leningrad, eggs were literally as rare as hen’s teeth. The Russians were starving. They had already resorted to eating books and each other. The chickens were long gone. Even should eggs fall magically from the sky, the winter of 1942 – when the book is set – was the coldest on record. And if the magical eggs survived the fall, they would likely freeze and be rendered completely useless. So, not an easy task then.
The younger of the two egg-seekers is Lev, a weedy, shy, fatherless 15-year-old who has been caught looting. The elder is Kolya, a handsome soldier who’s a hit with the ladies and who has been accused of deserting from the army. Together they embark on a hunt behind enemy lines, landing right smack-bang in the middle of the true horror of war and deprivation but never forgetting Lev’s embarrassing virginity or Kolya’s irritable bowel issues. How David Benioff – who is married to the gorgeous actress Amanda Peet (Jack & Jill, The X Files, Something’s Gotta Give) – managed to inject so much humour and hope into such a devastating story, I cannot imagine, but he does. Beautifully.