Solzhenitsyn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solzhenitsyn) presents us with a group of cancer patients in a Soviet hospital in 1955.
Together they are representative of Russian society of the time. Politics and ideology come under discussion on the ward. It’s the author’s understanding of how patients crumble under the pressure of their disease, though, that gives the novel its power. Vadim, Yefrem, Schulubin and Kostoglotov all have to wrestle with the memories of the lives they have lived as they confront the inevitable. A harrowing yet compelling modern work from 1968.
576 pages in Vintage Classics paperback edition.
ISBN 978-0099575511
Alexander Solzhenitsyn