Zone 22

An unforgettably powerful memoir in the tradition of Papillon and Midnight Express

Tig Hague works in the City of London. He lives in Essex with his wife, Lucy, and their young daughter.

When Tig Hague kissed goodbye to his fiancee, Lucy, he was already thinking of his return. The couple were going house-hunting, looking for their first home together. Tig was only going to be gone a few days on a routine business trip - the annual highlight of an otherwise unglamorous job working on the Russian desk of a London bank. 
 
But just hours later something went wrong at Moscow airport. Very wrong. 
 
Misunderstanding a request from customs for a backhander to speed his progress into the country, Tig was pulled to one side to have his bag searched. No more than a deliberate inconvenience, he thought. 
 
But Tig's world was about to implode with dizzying, terrifying speed. A tiny lump of hashish, nothing more than detritus from a recent stag weekend, was discovered in the pocket of an old pair of jeans. Too small to warrant anything more than a slapped wrist back home, he hadn't even known it was there. 
 
Tig was in Moscow's Piat Centrale jail by nightfall - and that was just a stepping stone on his way to a prison camp in Zone 22 of the bleak, remote wastes of Mordova. 
 
He wouldn't be returning home for years . . . 
 
Zone 22 is the shocking story of a young Englishman's struggle to survive the brutal, corrupt, almost medieval conditions of a prison camp in Putin's Russia - a gripping contemporary story in the tradition of Papillon and Midnight Express.

Tig Hague

In July 2003 young Englishman Tig Hague was on a routine business trip to Moscow when he was arrested at the airport. Within hours he was accused of a major crime. Next, he was tried and transported hundreds of miles to the remote, forsaken wastes of Mordovia.And prison camp Zone 22. 
 
Sentenced to spend the next four years there, every day was a struggle against disease, freezing temperatures, malnutrition, the unpredictable, sometimes terrifying behaviour of the camp guards and his fellow prisoners.But, most of all, it was a fight to ensure his own psychological survival. 
 
Only the thought of his girlfriend Lucy, fighting Russia's corrupt and labyrinthine legal system, kept Tig sane - and gave him a reason to see each day to its end. 
 
The English Prisoner is an extraordinary story of endurance, as one man - plucked from his normal, everyday life - is forced to reach deep inside himself to survive life in one of the bleakest outposts in the world: Russia's vast and unforgiving 'forgotten zone'.

The English Prisoner

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