Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 1999.
This has really become the ‘go to’ book if you want to know the events that occurred in October 1942 for the battle of Stalingrad. Shocking, stunning and compelling this book shows the true horrors and costs of war as well as the bravery of soldiers. Their strength and courage should not be forgotten and this book is essential reading.
The battle for Stalingrad became the focus of Hitler and Stalin's determination to win the gruesome, vicious war on the eastern front. The citizens of Stalingrad endured unimaginable hardship; the battle, with fierce hand-to-hand fighting in each room of each building, was brutally destructive to both armies. But the eventual victory of the Red Army, and the failure of Hitler's Operation Barbarossa, was the first defeat of Hitler's territorial ambitions in Europe, and the start of his decline.
An extraordinary story of tactical genius, civilian bravery, obsession, carnage and the nature of war itself, Stalingrad will act as a testament to the vital role of the soviet war effort.
Stalingrad is the first book in the acclaimed World War II trilogy by Antony Beevor. The second book in the trilogy is Berlin and the last, Paris after the Liberation.
Antony Beevor was educated at Winchester and Sandhurst. A regular officer in the 11th Hussars, he served in Germany and England. He has published several novels, while his works of non-fiction include The Spanish Civil War, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance, which won the 1993 Runciman Award, Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall, 1945. With his wife, Artemis Cooper, he wrote Paris After the Liberation: 1944-1949.
His book Stalingrad was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction, the Wolfson History Prize and the Hawthornden Prize in 1999. It became a number-one bestseller both in hardback and paperback, the UK edition alone selling half a million copies, and has been published around the world in twenty-one translations. Berlin: The Downfall 1945 has dominated the bestseller lists even more than Stalingrad. Most of his titles are published by Penguin.
Antony Beevor is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.
