Book description
THIS ORANGE INHERITANCE EDITION OF Life and Fate IS PUBLISHED
IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION
Books shape our lives and transform the way we see ourselves and
each other. The best books are timeless and continue to be relevant
generation after generation. Vintage Classics asked the winners of The
Orange Prize for Fiction which books they would pass onto the next
generation and why. Linda Grant chose Life and Fate.
This is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single
family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms
Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn
apart by ideological tyranny and war.
'I have urged all my friends to read it... I want others to feel as
I have done - that they are entering the heart of the twentieth
century, touching its pulse' Linda Grant
Vasily Grossman was born in 1905. In 1941 he became a
correspondent for the Red Army newspaper, Red Star, reporting
on the defence of Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin and the consequences
of the Holocaust, work collected in A Writer at War. In 1960
Grossman completed his masterpiece Life and Fate and submitted
it to an official literary journal. The KGB confiscated the noveland
Grossman was told that there was no chance of it being published for
another 200 years. Eventually, however, with the help of Andrey
Sakharov, a copy of the manuscript was microfilmed and smuggled out to
the west by a leading dissident writer, Vladimir Voinovich. Grossman
began Everything Flows in 1955 and was still working on it
during his last days in hospital in September 1964.
Linda Grant was born in Liverpool on 15 February 1951, the child of
Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants. She is the author of Sexing
the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution, The
Cast Iron Shore, Remind Me Who I am Again, Still Here, The People On
The Street: A Writer's View of Israel, The Clothes On Their
Backs,The Thoughtful Dresser and We Had It So Good. Her
second novel, When I Lived in Modern Times, set in Tel Aviv in
the last years of the British Mandate won the Orange Prize for Fiction
in 2000.
