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Early praise for Saint Petersburg: ""Richly-layered and packed with insight, this riveting account of terrible events tells us as much about the present as it does the past.""--Patrick Bishop, author of Paris 1944 ""McKay is a gifted writer; his prose has the cadence, tone and power of a Shostakovich symphony. Horror is majestically conveyed.""--Gerard DeGroot, The Times (London) ""Sinclair McKay has followed up his spellbinding history of Berlin with another tour de force. Saint Petersburg is a riveting account of a beautiful city with a dark soul. Interlaced between descriptions of incredible beauty and decay are such unforgettable tales of cruelty and courage as to make a reader weep or forget to breathe. McKay's magisterial history of Peter the Great's monumental gift to Russia will become a classic in its own right.""--Amanda Foreman, New York Times bestselling author of Georgiana ""The story of the siege of Leningrad is one of the great epics of modern history. It has been told many times before, but never in such an engrossing, moving, often horrifying but also uplifting way.""--Brendan Simms, author of Hitler

""From its earliest days, the city born as Saint Petersburg was a 'glittering architectural jewel, ' an enclave of romanticism and the arts (as well as revolutionary violence) on the frigid Baltic Sea. McKay narrates the horrors with unflinching, elegiac detail while continually returning to the city's culture as a source of heritage, identity, and useful distraction and tracing the ongoing consequences of the deadliest siege in human history.""--Booklist ""Making use of diaries, memoirs, and letters from those involved, McKay delivers a disturbing description of the siege itself. The horrors of war, skillfully told on an epic scale.""--Kirkus Reviews ""McKay is a gifted writer; his prose has the cadence, tone and power of a Shostakovich symphony. Horror is majestically conveyed.""--Gerard DeGroot, The Times (London) ""McKay offers an elegiac chronicle of the three-year siege of Leningrad. The author astutely dips into the city's past and future, from its 1703 founding (as Saint Petersburg) by Peter the Great through Vladimir Putin's birth there in 1952, looking for insights into what in the city's character allowed it to endure the siege's horrors. Lyrical and arresting, it's a kaleidoscopic account of a population pushed to the edge, but still enamored of life's splendor.""--Publishers Weekly ""Richly-layered and packed with insight, this riveting account of terrible events tells us as much about the present as it does the past.""--Patrick Bishop, author of Paris 1944 ""Sinclair McKay has followed up his spellbinding history of Berlin with another tour de force. Saint Petersburg is a riveting account of a beautiful city with a dark soul. Interlaced between descriptions of incredible beauty and decay are such unforgettable tales of cruelty and courage as to make a reader weep or forget to breathe. McKay's magisterial history of Peter the Great's monumental gift to Russia will become a classic in its own right.""--Amanda Foreman, New York Times bestselling author of Georgiana ""The story of the siege of Leningrad is one of the great epics of modern history. It has been told many times before, but never in such an engrossing, moving, often horrifying but also uplifting way.""--Brendan Simms, author of Hitler

Author Information

Sinclair McKay is the author of The Hidden History of Code-Breaking among other books published in Britain. He is a literary critic for The Telegraph and The Spectator and lives in London.

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