The Forbidden Garden

Named a Best Book of the Year by Scientific American and The Economist The riveting, untold true story of the botanists at the world’s first seed bank who made “the mad, heroic decision during the siege of Leningrad to guard biodiversity at the cost of human life” ( The New York Times , Editors’ Choice)—from the award-winning author of The Island of Extraordinary Captives . In the summer of 1941, German troops surrounded the Russian city of Leningrad—now St. Petersburg—and began the longest bloc