'Insein prison is as cruel as I'd heard. Occasionally I see other prisoners shuffling by in chains with eyes that have died. On my brief exercise periods I eat rotten mangoes from the mud . If I am moved about the prison it is only with a hood over my head.'
Within just ten hours of entering Burma and handing out pro-democracy letters, James Mawdlsey was sentenced to 17 years imprisonment. It was the third time he had been detained in Burma, a country terrorised by a brutal regime. Undaunted, he used his time in prison to challenge and defy the regime's lawless assumption of power. He endured torture, beatings, hunger strikes and over a year in solitary confinement.
This is the compelling account of Mawdsley's four years in and out of Burma. There he witnessed the regime's genocidal persecution of Burma's border people and the inhumanity of the prisons. He had suspended the promise of academic success and a comfortable family life in England, to pursue instead something more purposeful - and with quite extraordinary consequences.
