The Lighthouse of stalingrad

by Iain Macgregor, Constable, £25, ebook £14.99

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The battle for Stalingrad is famed as being one of the toughest ever fought.

The Lighthouse of Stalingrad tells the story of the battle – and more specifically, the fight for Pavlov’s House, named after the man at its very centre, and stark in its reality of the sheer cost of war to human beings.

Historian Iain Macgregor brings the graphic horror of the Second World War to life through his own storytelling and the eyewitness accounts of soldiers on both sides of a conflict, where the dead were left frozen where they had fallen.

It’s almost as if you are there with the men in the trenches. The author makes more than passing reference to the current invasion of Ukraine and rightly praises the part played by all peoples of the old Soviet Union, including Ukrainians, as the tide of Adolf Hitler’s ambition finally turned.