Suppressed by the KGB, Life and Fate is a rich and vivid account of what the Second World War meant to the Soviet Union.
On its completion in 1960, Life and Fate was suppressed by the KGB. Twenty years later, the novel was smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm. At the centre of this epic novel looms the battle of Stalingrad. Within a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war, Grossman s characters must work out their destinies. Chief among these are the members of the Shaposhnikov family Lyudmila, a mother destroyed by grief for her dead son; Viktor, her scientist-husband...

Ivan Grigoryevich is a political prisoner set free after 30 years in Siberia by Stalin's death. Returning to the fragments of his former life, and encountering those whose lies sent him to the Gulag, he finds that the years of terror have destroyed ordinary decency and imposed a collective moral slavery.

Deemed unfit for service when the Germans invaded in 1941, the author became a special correspondent for Red Star, the Red Army newspaper, observing on the Eastern front with a writer's eye the most pitiless fighting ever known. This title offers an account of the war on the Eastern Front.

Few writers had to confront so many of the last century's mass tragedies as Vasily Grossman. He is likely to be remembered, above all, for the terrifying clarity with which he writes about the Shoah, the Battle of Stalingrad and the Terror Famine in the Ukraine. 'An Armenian Sketchbook', however, shows us a very different Grossman; it is notable for its warmth, its sense of fun and for the benign humility that is always to be found in his writing.