A powerful and poignant YA non-fiction narrative about the composition of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony during, and partly inside, the siege of Leningrad. Tracing Shostakovich's early life during the Bolshevik revolution, then the slow tightening of totalitarianism and the rise to power of Stalin and the terror of the purges, taking its toll on artists and the intelligentsia, Shostakovitch himself only surviving partly by cruel luck and partly through his international fame, not a long-term survival strategy with the jealous Stalin.

The sudden brutal onslaught of Operation Barbarossa convulses Russia as German armies drive across the countryside, slaughtering the population of hated Slavs as they go. The siege of Leningrad is a long, ugly torment of military might and official incompetence and the grinding down of humanity as starvation reduces the population to near savagery.

Shostakovich composes the most of his symphony in the heart of the siege until he is evacuated with his immediate family. Once completed, it becomes an important cultural object of Russian spirit and defiance, a way of humanising the new Russian allies to the US, and even if it doesn't prompt them to open the second front, it contributes to reducing opposition to vital aid and increasing support.

It's an amazing, heartrending story of art surviving war, and helping people survive war. Theories of art and music and political philosophy and the strategies of war and the broad stretches of history are explained with simplicity and clarity, and the character of Shostakovich is explored through the murkiness of a society where people had to hide their true selves to survive and the secret police scrutinised everything.

A brilliant, riveting, passionate, big-hearted and heart-breaking book.