In her 2001 novel The Seige, Helen Dunmore tells the story of the blockade of Leningrad, when the Nazis tried to starve the Soviets into submission over one terrible winter.
She explains to the Guardian book club why she decided to write about such a traumatic episode, how she researched it and how she found the characters through whom she could tell the story.
The audience responded with questions of their own ranging from how she dealt with her historical sources to why she settled on its particular time frame and what happened to the famine victims strewn through the streets when the thaw set in.
