The Betrayal

July 4, 2011
Dunmore revisits Stalin's Leningrad in a powerful novel set a decade after The Siege. It's 1952 and Andrei Alekseyev; his wife, Anna Levina, a nursery school teacher; and her younger brother, Kolya (key characters in The Siege), have learned to live inconspicuously. In a world in which citizens are expected to be "vigilant" in reporting questionable behavior, attracting attention can lead to imprisonment or death. Andrei is a pediatrician with a dilemma in the form of a very ill 10-year-old boy whose surname evokes terror: Volkov, the boy's father, is an infamous senior officer in the Ministry for State Security. Andrei has little hope that his professional ethics will protect him or his family, but he allows them to guide him nonetheless, and the tale that unfolds is riveting. Dunmore alludes to the arrest of hundreds of physicians, most of them Jews, but for Andrei, the danger isn't that Volkov considers him part of the fabricated conspiracy of "murderers in white coats." The threat is that Volkov likes to punish those who displease him. With precise period detail and astute psychological insight, Dunmore brings the last months of Stalin's reign to life and reminds us why some eras shouldn't be forgotten.

August 1, 2011

In her sequel to The Siege (2002, etc.), Dunmore returns to Leningrad in 1952, compressing the anxiety and terror of the postwar Stalinist years into the intimate details of one family's crisis.

A sense of doom takes over from the first page when pediatrician Andrei is approached by a nervously sweating colleague who twists his arm to consult on a case they both know will bring trouble. Volkov, the head of State Security, has brought in his 10-year-old son Gorya with a badly swollen leg. X-rays show a cancerous tumor; Gorya's leg must be amputated. Andrei, whose specialty is arthritis, has no expertise in oncology, but Volkov demands he take charge of the case because Gorya likes him. Anti-Semitic Volkov even agrees to Andrei's recommendation of a Jewish surgeon. Although the amputation is successful and Gorya appears on the road to recovery, the surgeon immediately transfers out of Leningrad and recommends Andrei do the same to lower his visibility. Instead, he and his wife Anna, who fell in love during the Nazi's siege on the city, take a fatalistic approach, barely altering their routine. Since the wartime death of Anna's father, they have concentrated on raising Anna's little brother Kolya, now 16, like their own son in the relatively comfortable apartment they inherited from Anna's father, a politically unpublishable writer. In this relentlessly dark novel, Anna's petty battle with a neighbor who complains about Kolya's piano playing passes for comic relief. When one of the characters is arrested, history goes on to create an ironic deus ex machina par none—the arrest occurs in 1952; Stalin dies in 1953 and the iron glove relaxes.

Fictional drama blends seamlessly, if painfully, with factual history in this historical fiction of the highest order.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 15, 2011

Celebrated and award-winning author Dunmore brings readers back to afflicted Leningrad, the heroic Russian city that barely survived the appalling siege she chronicled in her 2002 novel, The Siege. Picking up with heroine Anna in 1952, Dunmore portrays a city under siege again, this time gripped by Stalin's terror. A young patient with an aggressive case of cancer becomes a patient of Anna's husband, Andrei. The boy's father is head of the secret police, so the staff treads cautiously. Soon, though, Anna, now a nursery school teacher, and her brother Kolya are sucked into the vortex of rage when the boy's treatment falters. Incorporating painstaking research both about the security apparatus and about the medical environment, Dunmore portrays the anguish of good-hearted people trying to live normal lives under a viciously capricious government. VERDICT Advise readers to delve into The Siege first to get the best value from the sequel. Enormously readable, this novel personalizes in intimate detail a harsh and important period of modern Russian history for YA and adult readers. [See Prepub Alert, 4/4/11.]--Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2011
Long-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, The Betrayal is the follow-up to The Siege (2001), though newcomers to Dunmore's Russian-set saga will find the sequel compelling on its own. Returning characters include pediatric physician Andrei and his wife, Anna. Having survived Hitler's brutal assault on Leningrad, the couple is now on guard against the enemy within, Stalin's cruel regime. As in The Siege, Dunmore brilliantly brings the experience of an entire society into focus through an intimate portrayal of a single family. When Andrei is asked to consult on the case of the son of a senior secret police officer, he and Anna immediately perceive the threat to their hard-won happiness. If things go poorly for the boy, Andrei will bear the blame. The suspense culminates in Andrei's edge-of-your-seat arrest in the middle of the night. How he and Anna react to the events that follow is a testament to the extraordinary bravery of ordinary people. How much Dunmore gets the reader to invest in what happens to the couple attests her skill.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)