Leningrad Nights

Introduction by Peter Straub

After they'd eaten the horses, they ate what the horses ate. Leningrad, World War II, during the Nine Hundred Days Siege... a city that is at once so beautiful and so terrifying that no-one knows its real name.

A metronome ticks on the municipal radio station, broadcast to people through loudspeakers erected in the icy streets, the fading pulse of a dying city. Leo Shapoval knows that he alone has been chosen to save it from silence. But only the semi-mythical Ice Road offers hope, and the 13 year-old Leo knows that the Ice Road - if it exists at all - is built in Heaven one day and Hell the next.

And so, as he moves around doing good, Leo must ignore the cynicism of his Uncle Yevgeny, speaking to him from beyond death; he must ignore the skepticism of the doppelganger who follows him and the underground Christians who blithely hope to break his faith in the dispassionate god of the Whistling Shell; and he must ignore the cannibals who roam the streets looking for sustenance.

It is the city itself that is struggling for control over the heart of the boy. And it is here, in the city's darkest secret, that Leo makes his choice between survival and damnation.

Limited to 500 signed and numbered softcovers and SOLD OUT at the publishers.