Industry of Souls Author:Martin Booth, Martin Booth The Industry of Souls is the story of Alexander Bayliss, a British citizen arrested in Leipzig by the KGB in the 1950s. He is erroneously charged with espionage and accused of being an enemy of the Soviet peoples, and after a brief and "utterly irrelevant" trial he is sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labor in the work camps of Sibe... more »ria. Officially reported drowned after his car went off a bridge, Bayliss (later known as Shurik) is reduced to "a filed dossier in a locked cabinet in the vaults of the Lubyanka, a lost man, a non-person." Eventually freed from the gulag in the 1970s, he has no reason to return to the West, a world he barely remembers and to which he no longer belongs--he has become Russian in everything but birth. He finds his way to the home of his best friend at the camp--Kirill. Taken in by Kirill's childless daughter and her husband, he eventually becomes a local school master--beloved by everyone in the village. Now, on the day of Shurik's 80th birthday, Russia is changed. Communism has evaporated. In the aftermath, Shurik's true fate has been revealed to the outside world and information has come to light that he is still alive. This moving story weaves from this momentous day to his harrowing past in the camp and his life in the village. And in the end, Shurik is presented with a choice, perhaps for the first time in his life... Martin Booth's brilliantly crafted novel is a celebration of life in the face of death, of humanity in the midst of a system that robs men of their dignity. It stands as a mature and profound exploration of the meaning of freedom and the essence of human friendship.« less