For fans of Elizabeth Wein and Ruta Sepetys, an absorbing, fast-paced YA debut novel about a girl’s determination to survive, and save her best friend, during the Nazi siege of Leningrad.

In a city ruled by hunger, the black market is Liza’s lifeline, where she sells or steals whatever she can get her hands on just for enough food to survive. Morality, after all, has become a fluid thing during the brutal year her city has been under siege. But when Liza's best friend proposes that they go to the secret police, rumored to give young women food in exchange for "entertainment," Liza thinks there surely must be some other way. Then her friend disappears, and Liza devises a plan to find her, entangling herself with two dangerous young men—one a member of the secret police, the other forced to live underground—and discovering there are some lines that should never be crossed.

Marina Scott was born and raised behind the Iron Curtain in Vilnius, Lithuania. She graduated from a local university with a master’s degree in library science, but a short stint in a Soviet library changed her mind about being a librarian. She immigrated to the U.S. in 2000 and now resides in Salt Lake City. She speaks Russian and Lithuanian in addition to English.