The Cancer Ward

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's semi-autobiographical novel unfolds across several spring weeks in 1955, two years after Stalin's death, among the patients of the cancer ward at a hospital in Tashkent, then part of Soviet Uzbekistan. Oleg Kostoglotov, a former soldier who spent time in a labor camp before being exiled to Central Asia, arrives for crude and frightening treatment in squalid conditions. Among his fellow patients is Pavel Rusanov, a personnel officer and informer who fears that a man he denounced years earlier will seek revenge. Through patients who profited from Stalinism, resisted it or went along with it, the novel examines moral responsibility for the purges. It circulated in samizdat before being banned in the Soviet Union.

It appears on a list of every book Barack Obama recommended during his presidency.