Darkness at Noon

(Arthur Koestler)

Koestler, like Solzhenitsyn, managed to humanise the Gulag and here he almost manages to explain the insanity of the Great Terror in this short but brilliant novel, in which a now discarded architect of the revolution decides to abandon his duty not to perish.  This writer has had a somewhat chequered past, but with this book he desreves substantial absolution.