Books like Vasily Grossman

A government official is shot almost at random, and Stalin’s machinery must manufacture a conspiracy equal to the crime. From that opening, Victor Serge follows the investigation through offices, prisons and distant outposts, giving accused men, functionaries and frightened witnesses each their full moral weight.

Often considered Serge’s masterpiece, the novel has the panoramic movement of Life and Fate but a sharper, more sardonic pulse. Serge had lived inside the revolutionary world before becoming one of Stalinism’s implacable critics; he therefore understood both the seduction of ideological certainty and the instant when doctrine becomes an alibi for cruelty. His characters are never merely victims or villains. They improvise, betray, endure and occasionally refuse. Few novels show so concretely how a lie becomes an institution—or how stubbornly an individual soul can escape its categories.

Human Acts begins amid the bodies left after the 1980 Gwangju uprising in South Korea, with a boy helping to identify the dead. Its scale is far smaller than Grossman’s, but its moral vision is comparably immense: every body a world, every official euphemism an assault on reality.

Han Kang, awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, writes with devastating restraint. The novel passes among voices marked by state violence, asking what the dead demand from the living and why shame so often attaches itself to the wounded rather than their persecutors. Like Grossman, Han refuses both consoling heroism and dehumanizing statistics; tenderness appears in physical, ordinary acts of witness. Human Acts is brief enough to read in a sitting, but its voices do not leave when the book ends.