Viv Groskop is an award-winning comedian, writer, and broadcaster. She is the author of The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature.Her new book is Au Revoir, Tristesse: Lessons in Happiness from French Literature.
At the Guardian, Groskop tagged five big, bold and brilliant books to last through lockdown, including:
Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (871 pages) was written in 1960 in secrecy and Grossman died thinking nobody would ever read it, especially after the KGB raided his flatRead about the other entries on the list.and destroyed everything including his typewriter ribbons. A friend smuggled a manuscript to the west and it depicts Grossman’s memories of the frontline during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. If you like it, the even more sprawling 900-page prequel, Stalingrad, came out in translation in English for the first time last year.
Life and Fate is among Jonathan Hyde's six best books.
--Marshal Zeringue
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