Have you ever read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich?Over the last couple of weeks:
Eldest by Christopher Paolini (read to my daughter)
And for myself, I finished Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago trilogy.
The courage shown by Solzhenitsyn by publishing a matter-of-fact treatment of Stalinist oppression while still residing in the USSR is awe-inspiring.