"Stasiland demonstrates that great, original reporting is still possible. . . . A heartbreaking, beautifully written book. A classic." -- Claire Tomalin, Guardian "Books of the Year"

Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction: a powerfully moving account of people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of people who worked for its secret police, the Stasi.

Anna Funder delivers a prize-winning and powerfully rendered account of the resistance against East Germany's communist dictatorship in these harrowing, personal tales of life behind the Iron Curtain--and, especially, of life under the iron fist of the Stasi, East Germany's brutal state security force. In thetradition of Frederick Taylor's The Berlin Wall and Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, Funder's Stasiland is a masterpiece of investigative reporting, written with novelistic vividness and the compelling intensity of a universal, real-life story.