The Madonnas of Leningrad - Couverture souple

“An unforgettable story of love, survival and the power of imagination in the most tragic circumstances. Elegant and poetic, the rare kind of book that you want to keep but you have to share.” (Isabel Allende, New York Times bestselling author of ZORRO)

“[A] heartfelt debut...[that] switches deftly between the siege and the present...[it is] admirably humane in its determination to restore the dignity Alzheimer’s strips away. What’s more, it largely avoids the sentimentality that mars so much writing about the old and infirm.” (New York Times Book Review)

“Dean writes with passion and compelling drama about a grotesque chapter of World War II.” (People)

“Rare is the novel that creates that blissful forgot-you-were-reading experience. This sort of transcendence is rarer still when the novel in question is an author’s debut, but that is precisely what Debra Dean has achieved with her image-rich book, The Madonnas of Leningrad.” (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

“Dean eloquently depicts the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease and convincingly describes the inner world of the afflicted. Spare, elegant language, taut emotion, and the crystal-clear ring of truth secure for this debut work a spot on library shelves everywhere.” (Library Journal)

“A thoughtful tragedy that morphs into a tear-jerker in the third act.” (Kirkus Reviews)

“An extraordinary debut. . . . Like the glorious ghosts of the paintings in the Hermitage that lie at the heart of the story, Dean’s exquisite prose shimmers with a haunting glow, illuminating us to the notion that art itself is perhaps our most necessary nourishment. A superbly graceful novel.” (Chang-Rae Lee, New York Times Bestselling author of Aloft and Native Speaker)

“[A] poetic novel.” (San Francisco Chronicle Book Review)

“Dean merges past and present in prose that shines like the gilt frames in the hermitage.... this novel of memory and forgetting glows with love and hope.” (BookPage)

“[A] heartfelt debut.” (New York Times Book Review)

A brilliant and moving debut novel about one woman's struggle to preserve an artistic heritage from the horrors and destruction of World War Ii, and the ensuing lifelong memories from this extraordinary experience. In this extraordinary first novel by Debra Dean, the siege of Leningrad by German troops in World War Ii is echoed by the destructive siege against the mind and memory of an elderly Russian woman. Marina, the woman in question, was a guide at Leningrad's famous Hermitage Museum. In the late autumn of 1941, as the Luftwaffe roared over and around Leningrad, she and her colleagues were set the task of taking the thousands of priceless paintings, sculptures and objets d'art out of the grand galleries of the former Tsarist Palace and storing them safely against the German bombardment and seemingly inevitable invasion. The German assault threatened to destroy a large part of Europe's artistic history: if Leningrad fell to the Germans, everything that was not destroyed would be looted and given to the Nazis. Marina, whose own parents had disappeared during Stalin's persecution of intellectuals in the 1930s, clings to her hope of becoming an art historian through her job at the Hermitage. The novel shifts between Marina's experiences at the Hermitage during the siege of Leningrad and her current existence as a very old lady in America whose mind has begun to fray. Debra Dean depicts, with subtle skill, how Marina's mind, already ravaged by disease, picks up some incident, object or person at the wedding she's been brought to, and flips back to the dreadful year-and-a-half in Leningrad which has informed her life ever since.