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Life and Fate is a truly incredible book - readable, thought provoking and deeply moving. Wildly underappreciated.

There's also an excellent translation with light commentary of Grossman's journalistic notes and articles from the war, "A Writer At War". Something that separates him from even certain more modern commentators is an intense concern for the experience of the ordinary soldiers, not just the cut and thrust of grand strategy and leadership.

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"A Writer at War" - the translation of his diary from 41-45 - is truly the most moving, most horrifying book I have ever read. After reading the account of the uprising at Treblinka, I was changed forever. I think it goes to show what an incredible man Grossman was, as just weeks after liberating the death camps, he resolutely chronicles the mass rape and murder of German civilians by his own forces.

He wrote an article during the war "the hell of Treblinka", (here in Russian http://lib.ru/PROZA/GROSSMAN/trebl.txt) This article was even used as evidence of the prosecution during the Nuremberg trials (says wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Grossman)

Agreed, great book. If you haven't read Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad as a 'non-fiction' take I can also highly recommend. I presume he must have been heavily influenced by Grossman.

He was! He worked on "A Writer at War", and if you check the quotes and references in Stalingrad a huge number are from Grossman or Ehrenburg

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