Stalingrad - Vasilii Grossman

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.

One needs time and patience to read Stalingrad, but it is worth it. Moving majestically from Berlin to Moscow to the boundless Kazakh steppe… A multitude of lives and fates are played out against a vast panoramic history
Evening Standard, *Book of the Week*

If you have read Grossman before, you will already very likely know that you urgently want to read Stalingrad. If you haven't, I can only tell you that when you do read this novel, you will not only discover that you love his characters and want to stay with them - that you need them in your life as much as you need your own family and loved ones - but that at the end, despite having finished an 892-page novel, you want to read it again
Daily Telegraph - Julian Evans

This is a big event… [Stalingrad] gives voice to a dizzying array of experiences… [you] feel as though you are there, wandering through those devastated streets among the starving, dead, and mad
Daily Mail - Claire Allfree

A dazzling prequel… His descriptions of battle in an industrial age are some of the most vivid ever written… Stalingrad is Life and Fate's equal. It is, arguable, the richer book - shot through with human stories and a sense of life's beauty and fragility
Observer - Luke Harding

Few works of literature since Homer can match the piercing, unshakably humane gaze that Grossman turns on the haggard face of war
The Economist