Letters to My TorturerLetters to My Torturer

Houshang Asadi was a journalist, writer, and translator who, under the Shah's regime, was a prison cellmate of Ali Khamenei (appointed successor to the Ayatollah Khomeini). After Asadi's arrest in 1983 in a crackdown on opposition parties, the prominent Iranian journalist spent the next six years being brutally tortured by "Brother Hamid." "After 682 days in solitary confinement, subjected to every deprivation, my 'confessions' were used, in a show trial lasting just six minutes, to sentence me to fifteen years in prison," the author recounts. Yet he was released with other surviving political prisoners on the anniversary of the revolution in 1989, and was able to escape Iran in 2003, living in exile since then. This book is a series of letters addressed to his torturer.