Waiting to Be Arrested at Night

An urgent tale of survival and subversion * Economist, *Books of the Year* *
Deserves to be read and listened to widely... This is a beautiful read. Izgil’s poetic gaze, and the elegant translation by Joshua L Freeman, together produce a compact, compelling prose that pushes you to keep reading on, even as you blink back tears * Financial Times *
So much more than a thrilling account of a great escape. It is nothing less than a call to the West not to look away from one of the most terrible genocides of our times * Sunday Times *
Izgil's memoir is a story about how to survive in, and to negotiate one's way through, a society in which repression has become routine, and the power of the state is unfettered. The book's restraint is also its strength * Guardian *
I… devoured it in one night. It is a stunning work with its lyrical prose and elegiac translation, a page-turner that stands alongside any thriller for the skill with which it builds tension as a noose tightens round an entire community… Tahir reveals again the banality of evil * i *
In the elegant, elliptical poems that appear throughout the text – translated, like the rest of the memoir, with great skill and subtlety by Joshua L. Freeman – Tahir both acknowledges and transforms the worsening political situation. Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of the book is its refreshing lack of political rhetoric: there are no pronouncements on the great evil of the Chinese state. Tahir lets the awful facts speak for themselves * Times Literary Supplement *
A heart-wrenching but beautifully written memoir * Daily Telegraph *
More than just a memoir... It is also the story of the Uyghur people and the political, social, and cultural destruction of their homeland by the Chinese state * TIME *
To call this merely 'a good book' is an understatement - it is essential reading -- Ai Weiwei, author of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
An outlier among books about human rights. This is in effect a psychological thriller, although the narrative unfolds like a classic horror movie as relative normalcy dissolves into a nightmare -- Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy