'A bleak and vivid account' BBC Radio 4

‘I am haunted by the feeling that it is not me I’m writing about, but some other man who lived through it all. It is as though I was watching a film about him, reading a book on him. And here is that book’

Shocking, but laced with wry humour, Vladimir Pereverzin’s extraordinary story is of an ordinary man whose comfortable life is upended. Refusing to give false testimony against Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, he is plunged into lengthy, brutal incarceration in Russia’s nightmarish prisons and penal colonies, including some in which political prisoner Alexei Navalny has been held.

Vividly told in this skilful translation, Vladimir’s ultimately uplifting memoir was first published in Russian in 2013, but, given new laws enacted in Russia to punish those who oppose its ongoing ‘special operation’ in Ukraine, it is, if anything, even more topical today.

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‘A very Russian story, and topical for all times . . . it tells you how to become truly free when deprived of liberty’ – Boris Akunin, author of the Erast Fandorin books