Life and Fate is fiction on the epic scale: powerful, deeply moving, and devastating in its depiction of a world torn apart by war and ideological tyranny. At the center of the novel, overshadowing the lives of each of its huge cast of characters, stands the battle of Stalingrad. Vasily Grossman presents a startlingly vivid picture of this desperate struggle for a ruined city, and how the ebb and flow of the fighting affect the lives and destinies of people far from the front line. With Tolstoyan grandeur that finds room for intimate detail, and deploying a multitude of superbly realized characters, Grossman delvers a message of terrifying simplicity: that Stalinism and Nazism are one and the same in their falsehood, cruelty, and inhumanity.

Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 in Berdichev, the home of one of the largest Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. After studying chemistry and working as a mining engineer, he was discovered by Maxim Gorky, whose support enabled him to begin publishing novels and stories.

Grossman was a combat correspondent during the Second World War, covering the disasters of the first year, the defense of Stalingrad, and finally the fall of Berlin. His account of a German death camp⁠—Treblinka⁠—was the first to be published in any language.

When Grossman completed Life and Fate in 1960 and submitted the manuscript for publication, it was confiscated by the K.G.B. Vasily Grossman died of cancer in 1964, his work still unpublished. More than ten years later, a microfilm copy was smuggled out of Russia. It has since been published, to great acclaim, in the major European languages.