The Reading Warehouse

Suppressed by the KGB and later smuggled out of the Soviet Union to be published, Life and Fate is a vivid and unsparing story of ordinary Russians caught between the fascism of the invading Nazis and the oppression of their own Soviet government. The sprawling plot follows the extended family of Viktor Shtrum along the vast eastern front of World War II. Shtrum is a brilliant nuclear physicist who faces anti-Semitism in Moscow while relatives of his face the threat of camps and prisons on both the Soviet and the Nazi sides.

In scenes that range from the dramatic battle of Stalingrad to the remote Siberian gulag, encompassing characters ranging from a grieving mother to a woman in love and from a six-year-old boy on the way to a gas chamber to Stalin and Hitler, Vasily Grossman's masterpiece is a profound and moving reckoning with the darkness of the twentieth century and a testament to the stubborn persistence of kindness and hope.