City of Thieves (novel)

Plot

The story is introduced as the recollections of the author's grandfather Lev, a contemporary Russian Jewish émigré, trying to survive the Siege of Leningrad after his father is "disappeared" by the NKVD and his mother and sister flee the city. Lev is arrested for looting the body of an ejected Luftwaffe pilot. Thrown in prison, he meets Kolya Vlasov, a young Cossack soldier arrested for deserting his unit. Though just three years older than Lev, Kolya is more cultured and refined. The two are brought to Colonel Grechko of the NKVD who barters with them: if they are able to obtain a dozen eggs for the colonel's daughter's upcoming wedding, Lev and Kolya will be given their freedom. If they are unable to find the eggs(a luxury in the starving Leningrad), both will be executed.

During Lev and Kolya's journey for the eggs, they come across an assorted cast of characters, including a pair of cannibals and a boy in the black market selling "library candy", food made from the bindings of books. At the brink of death, Lev and Kolya encounter a small cottage hosting four young women, who are kept there by the German soldiers to rape at night. Lev and Kolya plot to attack the next Germans to come, and as they start their attack, a group of Soviet partisans launches their own attack. Lev, Kolya, and Vika, a female partisan, venture into a poultry farm outside the city and allow themselves to be taken prisoner by the Germans. To gain the coveted dozen eggs, Lev must beat a sadistic German officer with the Einsatzgruppen death squads in a game of chess. Lev beats the man at the chess game and then kills him with a knife he has hidden in his boot.. He, Kolya, and Vika kill the other guards before escaping. Vika leaves to find another partisan group, but promises to find Lev after the war. As Lev and Kolya approach Leningrad on their way back, Kolya is shot by a Soviet soldier. He is taken to hospital but bleeds to death, while Lev discovers that the colonel had three dozen eggs airlifted in.

The end of the novel returns to the author's conversation with a now-elderly Lev in his apartment when the author's grandmother joins, and is revealed to be Vika.

Release

City of Thieves was released by Plume on March 31, 2009.

The audiobook, narrated by Ron Perlman, was released by Penguin Audio on January 8, 2009.

Reception

The book was very well received by most critics, including Jesse Berrett of San Francisco Gate and Boris Fishman of The New York Times. According to Jennifer Reese of Entertainment Weekly, "By listening carefully—and making the rest up—Benioff has produced a funny, sad, and thrilling novel. A-". However, Donna Rifkind of Los Angeles Times wrote that while the book "features a snappy plot, a buoyant friendship, a quirky courtship, an assortment of menacing bad guys, an atmosphere that flickers between grainy realism and fairy-tale grotesquerie and a grim but irrepressible sense of humor," it left her "thoroughly and discouragingly unmoved."

The novel was also credited as a major artistic inspiration for the critically acclaimed post-apocalyptic video game The Last of Us. The game's director Bruce Straley said: "It's nice to be inspired by [...] the right things. City of Thieves is an amazing book. Everybody should check that out."