Victim of Stalinist-era terror, Lena Constante was arrested on trumped-up charges of "espionage" and sentenced to 12 years in Romanian prisons. This is the extraordinary account of the first eight years of her incarceration - years of solitary confinement during which she was tortured, starved and humiliated daily. The only woman to have endured isolation so long in Romanian jails, Constante is also one of the few women political prisoners to have written about her ordeal. Unlike other more political prison diaries, this book draws us into the practical and emotional experiences of everyday prison life. It describes the physical and psychological abuses that were the common lot of communist-state political prisoners and recounts the particular humiliations she suffered as a woman, including that of male guards watching her in the bathroom. Constante survived by escaping into her mind - and finally by discovering the "language of the walls", which enabled her to communicate with other female inmates.