Why am I passionate about this?

I particularly enjoyed writing this book about a city that I love and have visited many times (starting in the late 1970s, when I was a student), and whose history I know well too. Most books, by foreigners anyway, talk about the city from a distance; I wanted to write something visceral, about sounds and smells as well as sights, and above all, how locals themselves think about their city, the way in which its intense and in some respects oppressive past shapes St Petersburg’s life today – yet all the same, never gets taken too seriously. Readers seem to agree: as well as an appreciative letter from Jan Morris, whose travel writing I’ve always admired, I treasure an email message from someone who followed my advice and tramped far and wide – before ending up in the room for prisoners’ relatives to drop off parcels at Kresty (the main city prison) when he wrongly assumed he was using an entrance to the (in fact non-existent) museum.


I wrote

St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past

By Catriona Kelly,

Book cover of St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past

What is my book about?

Fragile, gritty, and vital to an extraordinary degree, St. Petersburg is one of the world's most alluring cities--a place in…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of City-pick St Petersburg

Catriona Kelly Why did I love this book?

This is a great anthology in the City Picks series, with lots of different literary and essayistic texts about St Petersburg, including recent and offbeat ones as well as the classics. You can get lost in the place even if, for the moment, you can’t travel there!

By Heather Reyes, James Rann, Marina Samsonova

Why should I read it?

1 author picked City-pick St Petersburg as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Floating, lyrical, miraculous Petersburg ... Here's beauty built on bones, classical facades that cradled revolution, summers that lie in the cup of winter' - Helen Dunmore, The Siege Malcolm Bradbury guides us to the Hermitage Anna Pavlova describes her school days Vladimir Nabokov re-lives a Petersburg winter Helen Dunmore plunges us into the worst of times Serge Dovlatov shows some 'different' Petersburg film-making Dmitry Shostakovich reveals a musical secret Truman Capote takes Porgy and Bess to the Soviets Nikolai Gogol walks us down Nevsky Prospekt J.M.Coetzee reimagines Dostoyevsky ... over sixty writers on one of the world's most fascinating and…


Book cover of The Akhmatova Journals: Volume 1, 1938-1941

Catriona Kelly Why did I love this book?

Akhmatova was one of the most important poets in the city’s history, and here she is brought to life by an exceptionally talented diarist: elusive, but at times extremely frank, hesitant, vulnerable, while at the same time demanding. It is a riveting portrait. Chukovskaya also draws a fraught picture of Leningrad during the Stalinist Great Terror, as evoked in Akhmatova’s famous cycle of memorial poems, Requiem. Look out also for Chukovskaya’s novel about the Terror, Sofia Petrovna.

By Lydia Chukovskaya, Milena Michalski, Sylva Rubashova

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Akhmatova Journals as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Even in her own day Anna Akhmatova was ranked as one of the great Russian poets of the century. Yet she suffered scathing attacks from the Soviet establishment, was famously denounced as ""half-nun, half-whore"", and was finally expelled from the Writers' Union. Lydia Chukovskaya, an admirer who became the poet's close friend, kept intimate diaries that reveal the day-to-day life of a passionate artist forced to endure sorrow and oppression, yet still able to create poetry and friendship. This volume contains the journals kept between the years 1938 and 1941.


Book cover of Notes from the Blockade

Catriona Kelly Why did I love this book?

You can’t understand modern St Petersburg without an awareness of its wartime history, and among many searing accounts of the Siege of Leningrad, this has the greatest philosophical depth. The translation by Alan Myers is excellent, and there are helpful notes by Emily van Buskirk.

By Lydia Ginzburg,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Notes from the Blockade as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The 900-day siege of Leningrad (1941-44) was one of the turning points of the Second World War. It slowed down the German advance into Russia and became a national symbol of survival and resistance. An estimated one million civilians died, most of them from cold and starvation. Lydia Ginzburg, a respected literary scholar (who meanwhile wrote prose 'for the desk drawer' through seven decades of Soviet rule), survived. Using her own using notes and sketches she wrote during the siege, along with conversations and impressions collected over the years, she distilled the collective experience of life under siege. Through painful…


Book cover of Leningradsky Photo Underground

Catriona Kelly Why did I love this book?

It’s hard these days to get a sense of what Leningrad looked like back in the 1960s and 1970s, and these photographs are also a tribute to the alternative art of that era: grainy black-and-white-images of stray dogs on rubbish tips, drunks in backyards, dilapidated façades stretching along the eerie silver of canals. The photographers included (such as Boris Smelov, Lev Zviagin, Slava Mikhailov, Boris Kudryakov and Olga Korsunova) aren’t nearly as well-known as they should be, and are as interesting in their way as the ubiquitous Boris Mikhailov. For a comparable figure who isn’t included in Val’ran’s book because her work was only discovered recently, see this site with Masha Ivashintsova’s work, curated by her daughter.

Book cover of One Hot Summer in St. Petersburg

Catriona Kelly Why did I love this book?

An extraordinary, high-pitched, Munchausenesque account of a visit to only-just-post-Soviet Leningrad during an especially overheated period of recent history. Not at all like the genteel memories of champagne receptions at the Mariinsky Theatre followed by strolls down the Moika during the White Nights that one gets in other travelogues.

By Duncan Fallowell,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked One Hot Summer in St. Petersburg as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An account of Fallowell's time spent in St Petersburg during the summer of 1992. He was there to write a novel, but was seduced away from his work by the world of clubs, bars and restaurants, and the extraordinary architecture. He also fell in love with Dima, a 17-year-old naval cadet.


Explore my book 😀

St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past

By Catriona Kelly,

Book cover of St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past

What is my book about?

Fragile, gritty, and vital to an extraordinary degree, St. Petersburg is one of the world's most alluring cities--a place in which the past is at once ubiquitous and inescapably controversial. Yet outsiders are far more familiar with the city's pre-1917 and Second World War history than with its recent past. In this beautifully illustrated and highly original book, Catriona Kelly shows how creative engagement with the past has always been fundamental to St. Petersburg's residents. Weaving together oral history, personal observation, literary and artistic texts, journalism, and archival materials, she traces the at times paradoxical feelings of anxiety and pride that were inspired by living in the city, both when it was socialist Leningrad, and now. Ranging from rubbish dumps to promenades, from the city's glamorous center to its grimy outskirts, this ambitious book offers a compelling and always unexpected panorama of an extraordinary and elusive place.

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Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

By Mimi Zieman,

Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Mimi Zieman Author Of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives. 

Mimi's book list on women exploring the world and self

What is my book about?

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up the East Face without the use of supplemental oxygen, Sherpa support, or chance for rescue. When three climbers disappear during their summit attempt, Zieman reaches the knife edge of her limits and digs deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.


Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

By Mimi Zieman,

What is this book about?

The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain, which had only been successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first large team, Mimi Zieman and her team would climb without using supplemental oxygen or porter support. While the unpredictable weather and high altitude of 29,035 feet make climbing Everest perilous in any condition, attempting a new route, with no idea of what obstacles lay ahead, was especially audacious. Team members were expected to push themselves to their…


5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in St. Petersburg, gay men, and the Siege of Leningrad?

St. Petersburg 31 books
Gay Men 132 books