Books by Fatos Lubonja

The book contains eleven 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 devisenincreasingly strange and surreal strategies of resistance. The characters inndifferent 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.

A fascinating dissection of the political and social events which rapidly bought one of the world's strictest Stalinist regime to rough capitalism and financial collapse.

Prison camps in Communist Albania were as brutal and claustrophobic as Stalin's gulags, with the horror that Albanian prisoners could be charged and re-sentenced while already in prison. This memoir evokes life for prisoners of the state as they struggled to cope with the physical and psychological deprivations of imprisonment.