On its completion in 1960, Life and Fate (rather than its author) was arrested by the KGB. More than twenty years after its arrest, Life and Fate was smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm. At the centre of this epic novel looms the battle of Stalingrad. Within a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war, Grossman s characters must work out their destinies. Chief among these are the members of the Shaposhnikov family Lyudmila, a mother destroyed by grief for her dead son; Viktor, her husband, a scientist who falls victim to anti-semitism; and Yevgenia, forced to choose between her love for the courageous tank-commander Novikov and her duty to her former husband. Life and Fate is one of the great Russian novels of the 20th century and the richest and most vivid account there is of what the Second World War meant to the Soviet Union.