Everything Flows

Vasily Grossman is slowly becoming recognised as one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. Everything Flows is his unfinished swansong, written after the suppression of Life and Fate, his epic masterpiece of the Second World War.

Like Primo Levi and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Grossman witnessed some of the most traumatic events of the 20th Century, and then dissected them brilliantly through writing that is always sympathetic but never makes excuses. Like those writers, too, his books are not for the faint of heart. This is certainly true of Everything Flows, which draws on a finely-drawn cast of characters - a survivor returned from the Gulag, the man who informed on him, the wife of a political prisoner, a party activist complicit in genocide - to draw out a forensic portrait of the moral consequences of Stalinism. The finest, and most devastating, part of the book is its hallucinatory description of the Ukrainian Famine of the early 1930s. Cosy bedtime reading it is not.

 Robert and Elizabeth Chandler's sensitive new translation brings to new audiences a book that has not been easily obtainable in English until now. This is not only an overlooked classic of world literature, but also one of the truly essential books of the 20th Century.