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Darkness At Noon
by Auther Koestler

Written in 1940, this novel is set in the tumultuous Soviet Union of the 1930s, during the treason trials. Rubashov, the protagonist and a hero of the revolution, is arrested and jailed for things he has not done, though there is much about the current Soviet state that veered from his ideals as a revolutionary. His investigators, Ivanov and Gletkin, seek a public confession and interrogate him using a number of methods. Through the ordeal, Rubashov reaches an epiphany or two while his interrogators suffer the cruel fate of the Soviet machine. Darkness at Noon was based partly on his own experiences a prisoner and on Stalin’s trials. It revealed the totalitarian system and the decay of the Russian Revolution and was adapted for the Broadway stage by Sidney Kingsley in 1951.