Letters to My Torturer

A powerful memoir exposing the early Islamic Republic's Decade of Terror in the 1980s

In winter 1975, left-wing writer Houshang Asadi sat in a prison cell with a young Ayatollah Khamenei, both victims of torture under the Shah’s regime. Khamenei promised him that under an Islamic government, the innocent would not shed a single tear. In 1983, Asadi was arrested again, this time by the victorious Islamic revolutionaries. In two years in solitary confinement, Brother Hamid made Asadi bark like a dog, and tortured him until he confessed he was a spy for both the British and the Soviets. Newly updated with a final farewell to Brother Hamid, Letters to My Torturer is a stirring testimony of how the Iranian revolution devoured its own children.