“A remarkable, fact-based story of heroism and self-sacrifice under the harshest of war’s privations and of the desperate will to survive…. The prose of Hunger is terse, stripped to essentials, but it produces a lilting, nearly poetic quality. The detail is exacting and freshly presented…. A compelling exploration of the moral chasm that war can create.”
“An evocative account of a nameless man’s efforts to survive while all around him are dying…. Blackwell is brave in her assertions even if her narrator isn’t.”
“Ms. Blackwell writes in a lucid, serene style, which contrasts with her grim subject matter and increases its nightmarish quality…. As the narrator recalls these gruesome stories in small, slow-moving vignettes, they build like stanzas of a prose poem. Juxtaposed one against the other, they suggest a profoundly disturbing reality.”
“An eccentric, courageous, and poetic study of human beings in extremis.”
“A riveting fictional account, based on real events…. This stark debut novel is a poignant look at a wrenching period of history.”
“A quietly effective, poignant debut…. Blackwell offers gemlike observations and sensory detail…. The juxtaposition of the gnawing torment of starvation with the narrator’s memory of the exotic foods he collected and ate on his travels around the world before the war furnishes the novel with many of its tensions and delights…. A well-crafted novel that works largely because of its small, evocative moments.”
“Blackwell’s disciplined economy of prose enables her to write a complex story in concise, lean chapters…. The juxtaposition of passages exploding with the fertile images of Babylonia’s famed Hanging Gardens against the sterility of a life where even tree bark is a luxury gives a heightened intensity and human face to a historical story.”
“A sparse, exquisitely written story…. This tale of cowardice, bravery, and betrayal will linger long after the book is returned to the shelf.”
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 by Elise Blackwell
Reading group guide copyright © 2004 by Elise Blackwell and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company
Time Warner Book Group
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Visit our Web site at www.twbookmark.com
Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, April 2003
First Back Bay trade paperback edition, May 2004
The conversation with Elise Blackwell reprinted in the reading group guide at the back of this book first appeared at IdentityTheory.com. Copyright © 2003 Matthew Borondy. Reprinted with permission.
Blackwell, Elise.
Hunger / by Elise Blackwell. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-316-73895-6 (hc) / 0-316-90719-7 (pb)
1. Saint Petersburg (Russia) — History — Siege, 1941–1944 — Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Russia — Saint Petersburg — Fiction. 3. Rare plants — Fiction. 4. Scientists — Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.L3257 H86 2003
813’.6 —dc21
2002034130
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Q-FF
Book designed by Victoria Hartman
Printed in the United States of America