Description

Ivan Grigoryevich walks free after thirty years in the Gulag, but freedom feels as strange and fragile as captivity did.

Everything Flows follows Ivan as he returns to a country that has learned to survive through silence. Friends have compromised, neighbours have informed on each other, and even love has been shaped by fear.

Haunted by prison camps and betrayal, Ivan struggles not only to find work or shelter, but to understand how ordinary people endured, and enabled, terror.

Conversations with his cousin Nikolay and informer Pinegin force him to confront guilt, complicity and the quiet moral collapse that lingers long after the dictator’s death.

Set in the aftermath of Stalin’s regime, Everything Flows is both intimate and devastating: a reckoning with loss, responsibility, and the cost of surviving in a totalitarian state.

‘Everything Flows is as important a novel as anything written by Solzhenitsyn, and Robert Chandler’s superb translation makes it a joy to read’ Anthony Beevor

‘Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR’ Martin Amis

Publisher Review

As eloquent a memorial to the anonymous little man in the Stalinist state as Dr Zhivago is to the artistic spirit in post-Czarist Russia and The First Circle to the scientific intelligentsia * New York Times * Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR * Martin Amis * Possibly the greatest chronicler of the second world war * Guardian * Only Dante, in his account of Ugolino and his sons starving to death in a locked tower, has written of death from hunger with equal power -- Robert Chandler * London Review of Books * Supplies a wealth of information about the social context and Soviet terminology -- Christopher Taylor * Guardian *