The story is introduced as the recollections of the narrator's grandfather Lev Beniov, a contemporary Russian Jewish émigré. It is set in the first week of 1942, with the 17-years-old Lev trying to survive the Siege of Leningrad after his father is "disappeared" by the NKVD and his mother and sister flee the city. Lev is arrested for looting the corpse of a Luftwaffe pilot. Thrown in prison, he meets Kolya Vlasov, a young Cossack soldier arrested for deserting his unit. The two are brought to Colonel Grechko of the NKVD who barters with them: if they are able to obtain a dozen eggs for the colonel's daughter's upcoming wedding, Lev and Kolya will be given their freedom. If they are unable to find the eggs, both will be executed. During Lev and Kolya's search for the eggs, they encounter a pair of cannibals and a boy in the black market selling "library candy", food made from the bindings of books. They leave the city and go behind enemy lines. At the brink of death, Lev and Kolya encounter a small cottage hosting four young women, who are kept there by the German soldiers to rape at night. Lev and Kolya plot to attack the next Germans to come, but then a group of Soviet partisans launches their own attack. After a German counter-strike, only Lev, Kolya, and Vika, a female sniper, remain alive. They intersect with a German convoy shepherding Russian prisoners for 'processing' by the Einsatzgruppen, to which they attach themselves. To gain the coveted dozen eggs, Lev must defeat an Einsatzgruppen commander in a chess match. Lev wins the game and, in a subsequent scuffle, kills the commander with a knife he has hidden in his boot, while losing his index finger. He, Kolya, and Vika kill the other guards and escape with the eggs. Vika leaves to find another partisan group, but promises to find Lev after the war. As Lev and Kolya approach Leningrad on their way back, Kolya is shot by a Soviet soldier. He is taken to hospital but bleeds to death en route, while Lev discovers that the colonel had three dozen eggs airlifted in. The epilogue is set three years later. Lev is in his apartment when Vika turns up, bringing him, as a joke, a carton of twelve eggs. She warns him that she does not cook, suggesting they later married, as at the start Lev's grandson says his grandmother would never cook.
Release
City of Thieves was released by Plume on May 15, 2008. The audiobook, narrated by Ron Perlman, was released by Penguin Audio on January 8, 2009.
Reception
The book was well received by most critics, including Jesse Berrett of San Francisco Gate and Boris Fishman of The New York Times. According to Jennifer Reese of Entertainment Weekly, "Benioff has produced a funny, sad, and thrilling novel. A-". However, Donna Rifkind of Los Angeles Times wrote that while the book "features a snappy plot, a buoyant friendship, a quirky courtship, an assortment of menacing bad guys, an atmosphere that flickers between grainy realism and fairy-tale grotesquerie and a grim but irrepressible sense of humor," it left her "thoroughly and discouragingly unmoved." The novel was also a major artistic inspiration for the post-apocalyptic video gameThe Last of Us. The game's director Bruce Straley said: "It's nice to be inspired by the right things. City of Thieves is an amazing book. Everybody should check that out." The book makes an appearance in the sequel, The Last of UsPart II, where the character Abby is seen reading the book.
