Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance)

About the Author

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.

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.

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