Historical Fiction (13-18)

A Tale of the Days of Knox Near the seat she had chosen, beside the window, were the two things that she loved best in the world, and would have found the greatest difficulty in doing without. There stood her embroideryframe, with a very elaborate piece of work half- finished upon it. During the last few days, this work had necessarily given place to the higher duty of loving ministrations to the dying. But she was bound to complete it within a certain time, and therefore gladly took advantage of the first available moment to return to it. Something else, much more truly and deeply loved, lay on a small table near. It was a moderate-sized book, strongly bound in dark brown leather. Had you opened it, you would have found the Old and New Testaments in the French tongue, and matter enough besides, compressed into a narrow space, to have furnished a small but very useful theological library. There were references, indices, tables of contents, historical summaries.

It was hunger that drove 12-year-old Boris and his friend, Nadia, to forage for potatoes in the forbidden No-man’s-land that lay between the Russian and German lines outside the besieged city of Leningrad. But the long walk in the bitter cold, through miles of ice and snow, was too difficult for Nadia. As she lay on the ice, collapsed from exhaustion, Boris was at his wits’ end. When German patrol rescued the children and delivered them safely to the Russian lines, Boris learned that the hated enemy were not monsters — just ordinary men like any others — and that in war, everyone is the victim. Set in Leningrad during the dreadful 500 days in 1942-43 when it lay under siege by the German army, Boris is the story of a courageous boy who faces the bitter life-and-death realities of war and human survival, and, with a growing sense of compassion for all mankind, looks hopefully toward the future when all men can lay down their arms and embrace one another as brothers.