Winner of the English Pen Award
The book contains 11 dramatic and often horrifying stories, each describing the life of a different prisoner in the camps and prisons of communist Albania. The prisoners adapt, endure, and generally survive, all in different ways. They may conform, rebel, construct alternative realities of the imagination, cultivate hope, cling to memories of lost love, or devise increasingly strange and surreal strategies of resistance. The characters in different stories are linked to one another, and in their human relationships create a total picture of a secret and terrifying world. In the prisoners’ back stories, the anecdotes they tell, and their political discussions, the book also reaches out beyond the walls and barbed wire to give the reader a panoramic picture of life in totalitarian Albania.
Fatos Lubonja is Albania’s most distinguished opposition intellectual. He served 17 years in prison during communism, and since his release has been a fierce critic of the erosion of democracy.
“This is an incredible book because it is not a personal record of Fatos Lubonja's endurance in that grave, but of those of his other fellow prisoners whom he met in his odyssey through Albania's hellish prisons under the Enver Hoxha regime. Stories of survival, confrontation and horrendous, inhumane abuse.” —Anglo-Albanian Association
(A special thank you to book club member, Elke Richelsen for the suggestion.)