Life and Fate (Vintage Classic Russians Series)

One of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century * Times Literary Supplement *It is only a matter of time before Grossman is acknowledged as one of the great writers of the 20th century… Life and Fate is a book that demands to be talked about * Guardian *One of the finest Russian novels of the 20th century * Daily Telegraph *Vasily Grossman’s novel is burnt in my memory, not only by its huge canvas, its meditation on tyranny, and its dazzling description of war, but also because this is the novel that made me cry - not just a few leaked tears, but a full-scale sobbing episode - in Montpellier airport… Grossman lost his mother in a concentration camp. In Life and Fate, he writes with tenderness, and pain, not only of that experience but of what it is like to survive tyranny. A classic indeed – Gillian Slovo * Independent *One of the great writers of the last century * Observer *A literary genius. His Life And Fate is rated by many as the finest Russian novel of the 20th Century * Mail on Sunday *One of the world’s great war novels * Independent on Sunday *Vasily Grossman’s masterpiece, Life and Fate, is fascinating for many reasons, and one of them is the way that it is both a pastiche and a personal statement; a conscious, cold-blooded attempt to sum up everything Grossman knew about the Great Patriotic War, and at the same time to rewrite War and Peace * London Review of Books *

Vasily Grossman was born in 1905. In 1941, he became a war reporter for the Red Army newspaper Red Star and came to be regarded as a legendary war hero. Life and Fate, his masterpiece, was considered a threat to the totalitarian regime, and Grossman was told that there was no chance of the novel being published for another 200 years. Grossman died in 1964.