Prisons

The enclosed societies of prisons, with their layers of codified hierarchies, their distinctive restrictions and regulations, and their formal and informal power structures offer much literary potential for drama, tension and the examination of character. It’s a setting which has the potential to present a microcosm of society, in extremis, concentrating and distilling human nature, for better or worse.

- A death-row supervisor meets an unusual inmate in Stephen King’s serial novel, The Green Mile.

- The absurdist comedy Carrion Colony, by Richard King, explores the beginnings of white Australia in a colonial penal colony.

- When two mysterious strangers suddenly appear in the midst of a small town, wary hospitality turns to fear and cruelty, and they are imprisoned in The Cage, in the allegorical, fabulist tale by Lloyd Jones.

- The French Doctor Manette is imprisoned in the Bastille for 18 years in Charles Dickens’ account of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror in A Tale of Two Cities.

- Set in the Dutch East Indies at the turn of the century, the leader of the dissident movement has been jailed, and it’s the man set to watch and report on him and his comrades who is the subject of House of Glass by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the final in his epic quartet.

- In solitary confinement inside a Burmese prison, Teza continues to play a part in the struggle against a military dictatorship in The Lizard Cage by Karen Connolly.

- A makeshift jail in a locked cellar constrains the Magistrate of a border town who is accused of consorting with the enemy in J M Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.

- Falsely accused and wrongfully imprisoned, Edmond Dantès escapes from prison, makes a fortune, and becomes The Count of Monte Cristo in order to seek his revenge in the classic novel by Alexandre Dumas.

- Clarice Starling interviews a serial murderer in his prison cell in the psychological horror The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, in an attempt to solicit his help in hunting down another killer.

- Hanna accepts a sentence of life in prison for Nazi war crimes rather than reveal her secrets in The Reader by Bernhard Schlink.