The Forbidden Garden

Parkin tells the story of Nikolai Vavilov's seed bank, the world's first, and the botanists who staffed it through the 872-day siege of Leningrad, guarding a vault of edible seeds while the city around them starved. The moral center of the book is the choice those scientists faced without instruction from Moscow: eat the specimens now, or preserve them on the bet that future generations would need the genetic diversity more than the present city needed calories. Some staff reportedly died protecting seeds they could have eaten. Parkin doesn't resolve that tension into anything comfortable; he treats it as a real ethical fracture rather than a parable with an obvious moral, which is what keeps the book from tipping into hagiography of Vavilov's project.