Dorothea Dieckmann Guantánamo Verlag Klett-Cotta, July 2004. 158 pp. ISBN 3-608-93599-1 Rashid, a twenty-year-old from Hamburg, travels to India to visit his grandmother and collect in person the inheritance she is leaving him. After the days with his Nani and armed with his Lonely Planet guidebook he goes on a trek in the Himalayas. Later, in the guesthouse at Kathmandu, he is persuaded by a young Afghan called Mingul to join him and his family, first in Pakistan and then in Afghanistan, where the war is over. During his final days in Peshawar he wanders into an anti-American demonstration. He is arrested, spends two nights chained and hooded in the loading bay of an airplane, and is then transported to the American prison base at Guantanamo Bay. This is the story that Rashid pieces together in the first pages of this novel, which goes on to describe how he tries to keep his panic under control as he loses all feeling in his limbs and the pain of twisted muscles sets in; and though the book is fiction, the emotions are all too real. Successive chapters describe how he deals with the claustrophobia and pain of the transport; the isolation of the cage where he is kept; the night that never falls but instead is accompanied by the fluorescent lights from the watchtowers; the interrogations and torture; the ways in which his mind is goaded into playing tricks; and the paradoxical fact that at the hands of their American captors even those without any active political interests can come to feel the intoxication of the Jihad. At times Rashid is totally indifferent to his companions, concentrating instead on the movements of a lizard or scorpion. He fills the aching void inside him by recalling memories of home – Hamburg under the snow, the way his girlfriend moves, his father, the family shop. The author has researched her subject meticulously and, as she notes at the start of the novel, where no one is allowed access she has sent her imagination. Writing from the perspective of the prisoner, she vividly describes the disintegration of time, place and finally self. The result is a sober and sobering read that deals with an urgent issue.