This story of a typical day in a Soviet labour camp in Siberia caused a sensation when it was first published in 1962 and it retains its power nearly forty years on. Ivan Denisovich is a Russian peasant who, at the end of the Second World War, was captured by the Germans. He escaped and returned to his own forces but, in the eyes of the state, he was tainted by his contact with the enemy and sentenced to a labour camp. The novel records the minutiae of Ivan Denisovich s daily routine and the small triumphs which enable him to endure. He barters successfully for extra food. A stool-pigeon among the prisoners is punished. Nothing dramatic occurs in the course of the short novel, told in the plainest and most unaffected of prose, but the indictment of the Soviet system and its inhumanity is none the less unforgettable.