Based on the true experience of one man's brutal interrogation, incarceration, and separation from his family, Mahmoud Saeed's novel exposes the secret workings of Saddam Hussein's brutal police state from within. One morning Mustafa Ali Noman, a teacher in Baghdad, is arrested as he reaches the school gates. For the next 15 months he is brutally interrogated, moved from prison to prison and barred from contacting his family; he witnesses countless scenes of torture. It becomes clear to Mustafa along his journey through the desert gulags that the question of guilt or innocence is irrelevant ... 'How do I know that I am not dreaming this?' he asks, as, under intolerable pressure, his grasp of reality begins to weaken. Mahmoud Saeed's devastating novel evokes the works of Kafka, Solzhenitsyn and Elie Wiesel. It is a vivid account of the wanton and brutal treatment of the Iraqi people by Saddam Hussein's feared secret police and of the arbitrariness of life under tyranny.