Between Shades of Gray
Non-Fiction
Ruta Sepetys
Philomel Books
March 22, 2011
Hardcover
344
English
February 3, 2023 February 9, 2023
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Lina is just like any other fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl in 1941. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys. Until one night when Soviet officers barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they've known. Separated from her father, forced onto a crowded and dirty train car, Lina, her mother, and her young brother slowly make their way north, crossing the Arctic Circle, to a work camp in the coldest reaches of Siberia. Here they are forced, under Stalin's orders, to dig for beets and fight for their lives under the cruelest of conditions.
Lina finds solace in her art, meticulously—and at great risk—documenting events by drawing, hoping these messages will make their way to her father's prison camp to let him know they are still alive. It is a long and harrowing journey, spanning years and covering 6,500 miles, but it is through incredible strength, love, and hope that Lina ultimately survives. Between Shades of Gray is a novel that will steal your breath and capture your heart.
About the book
We are in Lithuania at the beginning of the Second World War, Lina with her family is deported to Siberia in a labour camp, but she doesn’t know why. Her family, like other families of university professors, writers and doctors, is on the black list that the Soviet police uses to deport people. She only wants to draw and perhaps this ability is her only salvation.
