Stalingrad

One needs time and patience to read Stalingrad, but it is worth it. Moving majestically from Berlin to Moscow to the boundless Kazakh steppe… A multitude of lives and fates are played out against a vast panoramic history

Evening Standard, *Book of the Week*

If you have read Grossman before, you will already very likely know that you urgently want to read Stalingrad. If you haven’t, I can only tell you that when you do read this novel, you will not only discover that you love his characters and want to stay with them – that you need them in your life as much as you need your own family and loved ones – but that at the end, despite having finished an 892-page novel, you want to read it again

Julian Evans, Daily Telegraph

This is a big event… [Stalingrad] gives voice to a dizzying array of experiences… [you] feel as though you are there, wandering through those devastated streets among the starving, dead, and mad

Claire Allfree, Daily Mail

A dazzling prequel… His descriptions of battle in an industrial age are some of the most vivid ever written… Stalingrad is Life and Fate’s equal. It is, arguable, the richer book – shot through with human stories and a sense of life’s beauty and fragility

Luke Harding, Observer

Few works of literature since Homer can match the piercing, unshakably humane gaze that Grossman turns on the haggard face of war

The Economist

‘How wonderful to see Grossman’s vision finally come to life. A masterwork told with devastating detail, humour, and profound insights into the essence of truth. I was riveted’

Lara Prescott, author of The Secrets We Kept

The almost polyphonic breadth and rich nuance of Grossman’s prose is perfectly captured by Chandler’s translation, accomplished with his wife Elizabeth. At close on 1,000 pages, it’s a monumental achievement

UK Press Syndication

[Grossman’s] characters witness, suffer and reflect with a hyper-real intensity. It illuminates nearly every page like the hellish glow that lights up the night sky over Stalingrad

Economist

Stalingrad… teems with love, devotion and wonderful flashes of humour. Sometimes all three arrive at once… but the most indelible passages arrive during the battle itself. The blow-by-blow accounts of young men willing to die to gain enough time for reinforcements to arrive from the east bank of the Volga are positively Homeric

Tobias Grey, Financial Times

An amazing achievement of translation and scholarship. It’s lucid and readable, with moment of wonderfully evocative prose… an astonishing example of the compromises between creativity and censorship

Marcel Theroux, Guardian

[Grossman’s] faith in common decency and kindness as the best antidote to totalitarian tyrannies blows like a gale through the book

Max Davidson, Mail on Sunday

Grossman’s most humane writing about injustice and atrocity paradoxically emerges from his own didactic Socialist Realist style. His desire to connect individual lives with the great flow of history transformed itself in an ability to speak for individuals lost and destroyed in the flow… Even now, Vasily Grossman remains a stepson of the time

Rachel Polonsky, Times Literary Supplement

Rare is the book that weighs the same as an artillery shell, rarer still one that weighs on the conscience as if a moral obligation. Stalingrad does that… This is a book to be absorbed over the course of a life, read and re-read from new perspectives… Each reading of Stalingrad would represent a movement closer to its elusive core, to its heart that keeps on beating through time

Alasdair McKillop, Herald

Stalingrad has been beautifully translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, and lovingly pieced together, with the censored passages restored. Anybody who knows and admires Life and Fate would enjoy it (many of the same characters reappear)… It is a powerful war book

Victor Sebestyen, New Statesman

Compelling… [and] extraordinary storytelling… The English translation is an epic in itself… the story of the publication process sheds new light on how the typescript became almost as much of a battleground as the streets of Stalingrad. It gives a clear insight into the nature of Soviet political pressure, and of Grossman’s bravery… It’s a pleasure, albeit a bleak one, to see more of his brave work at last being rediscovered and published today, and his truth told

Vanora Bennett, Prospect

More than a novel, more than a history, more than graphic imagery, Stalingrad is written with an acute insight into the relationships of people caught up in the momentous tectonic shifts of history. A truly symphonic work… Robert and Elizabeth Chandler’s superb translation and editing…captures Grossman’s poetic intensity, bringing home the pain and the pity of a dying city

Gordan Parsons, Morning Star

A gloriously written book

Mark Glanville, Jewish Chronicle

The novel in this new, uncensored version does constantly what the best journalism does, which is to offer us significant details and show how they form part of a larger story… [a] wonderful novel… The translation that the Chandlers have put together is a masterpiece of empathy, a true mirror of the values that Grossman consistently champions over the course of Stalingrad… an engrossing, coherent and deeply moving work of art… a truly remarkable achievement

James Womack, Literary Review

An argument to read him not only as a fervent critic of totalitarianism, but as a deeply compassionate writer with an extraordinary gift for portraying psychological complexity and sensory detail

New Republic

This first English version of Stalingrad is a triumph on many levels… [Stalingrad] captures a definitive moment… [and Grossman] delivers an enduring tribute to the power of human spirit

Ella Walker, Herald

A seething fresco of combat, domestic routine under siege and intellectual debate, it confirms that Grossman was the supreme bard of the second world war

Economist, *Books of the Year*

To read Stalingrad is to be immersed in a world where everything is in flux… The reader emerges from his pages exhausted and chastened, but hugely enriched… the translators have done a superb job. If you haven’t read Life and Fate, it would pay to read Stalingrad first and prepare for the marathon of both volume; if you have, Stalingrad is an essential companion’

Dougal Jeffries, BJGP

A powerful account of families torn apart by probably the bloodiest campaign in history

Janet Margaret Hartley, Geographical