WHAT must be one of the outstanding events in the book publishing year was the first English edition, superbly translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, of Victor Grossman’s Stalingrad, a  kind of prequel to his magnificent Life and Fate.
 
Grossman was throughout the second world war a special correspondent for Red Army newspaper The Red Star and was posted in 1942 to the armageddon of Stalingrad, the battle that marked the beginning of the end of Hitler’s war.

More than simply a novel or history, this symphonic work captures the day-to-day desperate struggle for survival by soldiers and civilians alike.

There is no glamorisation in Grossman’s merging of cinematographic detail with a poetic prose that captures the pain, hope, love and seemingly impossible resilience of humanity at the extreme.