4,000 Days: My Life and Survival in a Bangkok Prison

In 1978, Thai officials captured Warren Fellows attempting to smuggle heroin into his native Australia. The author spent the next twelve years in Bangkok's infamous Bang Kwang prison. Thrown into this crumbling, understaffed hellscape - prowled by sadistic guards and violent inmates; unsanitary, unregulated, and unforgiving - Fellows encountered both the brutal physical realities of prison life and the even more terrifying psychological ones: surrender of hope, exhaustion of spirit, the dull ache of uncompromising despair. In prison, Fellows survived countless torturous beatings, ate rats and cockroaches, endured solitary confinement under horrifyingly inhumane conditions, and witnessed countless executions. He learned to numb himself to the screams of his fellow inmates - as common as the vermin crawling his cell. Now a free man, Fellows captures the filth, pain, anger, hopelessness, and torture of life in Bang Kwang with vivid, engrossing detail and brutal honesty.