The Lizard Cage
by Karen Connolly
It’s a novel about this man known as the songbird, who was supposed to be a doctor and got muddled up in the Aung San Suu Kyi pre-NLD elections in 1988, and was put in solitary in this appalling cell. He meditates in his cell and doesn’t talk to anybody but the lizards and the ants to stop himself going mad. There’s this appallingly brutal jailer who beats him, and won’t let him wash. It’s really ghastly, but it lifts the veil on conditions in Burmese prisons.
