A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, <b>Life and Fate</b> is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the twentieth century. <br><br>Interweaving a transfixing account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia, Vasily Grossman fashions an immense, intricately detailed tapestry depicting a time of almost unimaginable horror and even stranger hope. <br><br><b>Life and Fate</b> juxtaposes bedrooms and snipers' nests, scientific laboratories and the Gulag, taking us deep into the hearts and minds of characters ranging from a boy on his way to the gas chambers to Hitler and Stalin themselves. <br><br>This novel of unsparing realism and visionary moral intensity is one of the supreme achievements of modern Russian literature.