American Anna Benz lives in comfort and affluence with her Swiss banker husband and their three young children in a picture-perfect suburb of Zurich. Despite the tranquility and order of her domestic existence, Anna is falling apart inside. Isolated in a foreign country and a faltering marriage, Anna begins three adventures to restart her life: Jungian analysis, German language classes, and a series of extramarital affairs whose consequences she cannot...

It is 1988 and Saul Adler, a narcissistic young historian, has been invited to Communist East Berlin to do research; in exchange, he must publish a favorable essay about the German Democratic Republic. As a gift for his translator's sister, a Beatles fanatic who will be his host, Saul's girlfriend will shoot a photograph of him standing in the crosswalk on Abbey Road, an homage to the famous album cover. As he waits for her to arrive, he is grazed...

"Vasily Grossman's three war novels are recognizably the work of the same writer; all display his sharp psychological insights and his gift for descriptive passages that appeal to all our different senses. Nevertheless, the goals he set himself in these novels are very different. Life and Fate is not only a novel but also a work of moral and political philosophy, focusing on the question of whether or not it is possible for someone to behave ethically...

Vienna, 1938: Austria is occupied by the Nazis. Dr. Josef Bartok is preparing to flee to America with his wife Anna when he is arrested by the Gestapo. As a former notary to the deposed Austrian aristocracy, he is told to help the local Gestapo leader gain access to their private bank accounts to fund the Nazi regime. Refusing to cooperate, Bartok is locked in solitary confinement. Just as his mind is beginning to crack, Bartok happens upon a book...