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FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews Everything FlowsBy Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, with Anna Aslanyan Harvill Secker, 290pp. £16.99

A MAN MAKES his way slowly back to Moscow. The train journey has taken days. But no, it has taken years; decades of suffering. His mind is heavy with memories, and his eyes, watching the scene ever changing from the carriage window, are weary from the array of images as the rain rushes past “brick factories and little village houses built from logs, past tin-grey fields of cabbages, past station platforms where the night rain seemed to have created grey puddles of asphalt”. The train journey has taken a lifetime because the man in the carriage has just completed a 30-year sentence spent in labour camps. But now Stalin has died and everything has changed.