The author analyses the novels Siege by Helen Dunmore and Fires in the Dark by Louise Doughty in the context of postmodern returns to historical experience. She examines how two contemporary British novelists recreate the painful experience of a Russian family during the siege of Leningrad during WWII and of a Romany family in pre-war Czechoslovakia and during the Protectorate. She also contributes to the debate on the freedom of the writer to choose themes that may be jealously guarded as a heritage of a particular community to which the writer does not belong.