One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
1962 · 208 pages
Reveille to lights out in a Soviet labor camp, where the prisoner Shukhov scrounges an extra crust and lays bricks well in the cold. He counts it almost a happy day.
★ 7.9
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Kolyma Tales
1978 · 508 pages
Shalamov spent seventeen years in the Kolyma camps. His stories are short, about frostbite and stolen bread and men too weak to lift a shovel, and he insists that suffering teaches nothing.
★ 7.1