NOVEMBER 1942

A meticulous chronicle of ordinary people in the extreme circumstances of war.

When looking at the epic sweep of World War II, it is easy to forget that the big picture involves millions of personal experiences. Englund, a member of the Swedish Academy and winner of the August Prize, draws on diaries, journals, memoirs, and records to delve into the lives of those who lived through the war. He covers the gamut from battle-hardened soldiers to home-front civilians, from a concentration-camp inmate to a scientist working on the Manhattan Project. The frame for the narrative is the month of November 1942, which the author sees as the pivotal point in the war. After that, with the tide turning at Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, and in North Africa, it was just a question of time for the Axis countries. This is a massive undertaking, ably translated by Graves, who worked with Englund on a previous book, The Beauty and the Sorrow, which similarly looked at World War I. The tone of this book is unremittingly grim, and some of the most heartrending stories are those of civilians who were swept up by the flood. One of the most painful is that of Mun Okchu, a young Korean woman forced into sex slavery by the Japanese army. Amazingly, she survived the protracted ordeal. Englund deserves admiration for bringing such an impressive body of research together, but the text is sometimes difficult to follow. The narrative, set out chronologically, leaps from one place to another and between characters. With this disjointed structure, readers may struggle to engage fully with the individual stories or remember who is where. Perhaps Englund would have done better to focus on fewer people and narrate their tales more coherently. The book is commendable but not for everyone.

A stark, challenging-to-read picture of the war from the bottom up.