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Does anyone know of any good fiction books out there that are set in a forced labor camp of the kind that existed/exists in Communist countries? There are plenty of fiction books about German concentration camps (my favorite is Styron's Sophie's Choice), but none that I know of about life in the gulags.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago & One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich come immediately to mind.
A book I read recently is Under a Blood Red Sky by Kate Furnivall is in part set in a Russian labour camp.

The Hunger Angel: A Novel
by Herta Muller, Philip Boehm (Translator)

-- 13 Nov 2013, 01:44 --

This, more recent translation, is supposed to be the best and won a prestigious award.
Haven't read it yet, but I surely plan to.
It was nominated by El Greco on here for "Book of the Month".
I will just copy and paste what he copied and pasted:

(German: Atemschaukel) is a novel by German Nobel Prize-winning author Herta Müller, published in 2009 by Carl Hanser Verlag.[1] It is a depiction of the persecution of ethnic Germans in Romania by the Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union, and deals with the deportation of Romanian Germans to Gulag camps by Soviet occupying forces during and after 1945. The novel tells the story of a youth from Hermannstadt (Sibiu) in Siebenbürgen (Transylvania), Leo Auberg, who is deported at the age of 17 to a Soviet forced labor concentration camp in Nowo-Gorlowka (Novogorlovka, Ukraine, now incorporated in Gorlovka) and spends five years of his life there. It is inspired by the experiences of poet Oskar Pastior and other survivors, including the mother of the author.[2] Initially, Pastior and Müller had planned to write a book about his experiences together, however, Pastior died in 2006.[3]

-- 13 Nov 2013, 02:39 --

And then there is Kolyma Tales by Russian author Varlam Shalamov, about labour camp life in the Soviet Union.
I read it years ago as required reading for a Russian Lit class. I remember that I enjoyed reading it a lot though.

The Hunger Angel looks really interesting. It has a lot of positive reviews too. Darn, another book to add to my never ending "to read" list.

I don't know if they involve the gulags, because I haven't read the books, but there is a mystery series set in North Korea - the first book is A Corpse in the Koryo, and the author is James Church.

This one's a young adult book, but I highly recommend it. It's called "Between Shades of Gray." BETWEEN, not FIFTY.
It's about a Lithuanian teenage girl who is sent to the gulags with her family and tries to get contact with her father (and stay alive) while hanging on to her artistic talents. The title comes from a scene in the book where she paints a watercolor in the snow by mixing ash and snow, hence making "shades of gray".
Highly recommend it.

Fran wrote:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago & One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich come immediately to mind.
A book I read recently is Under a Blood Red Sky by Kate Furnivall is in part set in a Russian labour camp.

Hey, I was going to mention those same two books. Drats .... just for that .... !!!!!!!!!!!!! .... take that ! *LOL*

Totally agree with Fran. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is an excellent and all-inclusive, nonfictional account of the workings of the political-penal system during the Stalin era. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, also by Solzhenitsyn, is a fictional story which, as the title implies, involves events which occur over a typical 24 hour period in a gulag prison camp. The Gulag Archipelago is a very long and involved study of the gulag system and the politics of the times; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is MUCH shorter and presents life in a gulag through the eyes of the inmates, and as Solzhenitsyn experienced events such as this himself, has the ring of authenticity.