An urgent tale of survival and subversion

Deserves to be read and listened to widely… This is a beautiful read. Izgil’s poetic gaze, and the elegant translation by Joshua L Freeman, together produce a compact, compelling prose that pushes you to keep reading on, even as you blink back tears

So much more than a thrilling account of a great escape. It is nothing less than a call to the West not to look away from one of the most terrible genocides of our times

Izgil’s memoir is a story about how to survive in, and to negotiate one’s way through, a society in which repression has become routine, and the power of the state is unfettered. The book’s restraint is also its strength

I… devoured it in one night. It is a stunning work with its lyrical prose and elegiac translation, a page-turner that stands alongside any thriller for the skill with which it builds tension as a noose tightens round an entire community… Tahir reveals again the banality of evil

In the elegant, elliptical poems that appear throughout the text – translated, like the rest of the memoir, with great skill and subtlety by Joshua L. Freeman – Tahir both acknowledges and transforms the worsening political situation. Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of the book is its refreshing lack of political rhetoric: there are no pronouncements on the great evil of the Chinese state. Tahir lets the awful facts speak for themselves

A heart-wrenching but beautifully written memoir

More than just a memoir… It is also the story of the Uyghur people and the political, social, and cultural destruction of their homeland by the Chinese state

To call this merely ‘a good book’ is an understatement – it is essential reading

An outlier among books about human rights. This is in effect a psychological thriller, although the narrative unfolds like a classic horror movie as relative normalcy dissolves into a nightmare