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From the award-winning author of The Island of Extraordinary Captives, the riveting, untold true story of the botanists at the world's first seed bank who faced an impossible choice during the Siege of Leningrad: eat the collection to prevent starvation, or protect their life's work to help end world hunger?. In the summer of 1941, German troops surrounded the Russian city of Leningrad - now St. Petersburg - and began the longest blockade in recorded history, one that would ultimately claim the lives of nearly three-quarters of a million people. At the center of the besieged city stood a converted palace that housed the world's largest collection of seeds - more than 250,000 samples hand-collected over two decades from all over the globe by world-famous explorer, geneticist, and dissident Nikolai Vavilov, who had recently been disappeared by the Soviet government.