'It took three weeks to read and three weeks to recover from the experience. Novels fade, your immersion in their world turns into a faint dream, and then is forgotten. Only great literature grows in the imagination. Grossman's book did more than grow, it seemed to replace everything I had previously felt...In the seven years since I first read Life and Fat I have urged all my friends to read it... The novel should be as famous as Doctor Zhivago or The Gulag Archipelago. ' You can read Linda Grant's full Introduction to Life and Fate in this Orange Inheritance edition published by Vintage.
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
Author
About Vasily Grossman
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 novel and 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.
