Hostage of the Land of Freedom. 888 Days in an American Prison

Mira Terada (before marriage: Oksana Vovk) was detained in Finland in 2018 on money-laundering charges, and then extradited to America. There, the Russian woman was sentenced to 46 months in prison.

The book is based on diary entries that Mira kept during her imprisonment, recording the tiniest details that made up the inhuman conditions of her existence in the cell. Desperate attempts to prove her innocence, repeated requests for help from people of different countries, the terrifyingly absurd adaptation to prison life, unexpected meetings and acquaintances in a foreign country on a faraway continent—all of this forms the fabric of Mira Terada’s prison biography, which for the first time appears before Russian readers. The author’s account of life in prison is not by chance intertwined with the equally full-of-suffering and oppression story of her marriage. And both parts of her life unexpectedly intersected in an American prison. Long, endless days in a cell, unbearable waiting for freedom—an expectation that becomes more and more unreachable with every passing day… This narrative, incredible in the degree of tension, reveals all the truth about an American prison and answers the main question—how to survive in inhuman conditions while staying a person.