A harrowing tale of one woman’s fight for survival, Freedom Star tells the deeply moving story of love, loss, and the fight against oppression. Set against the backdrop of the the CCP’s forced labour camps of Xinjiang– with wrenching depictions of the ongoing genocide sourced directly from survivor’s accounts– Dr. Svet Di-Nahum exposes the violence underlying the modern Chinese regime. More than a novel, Freedom Star represents the pinnacle of a career of scholarship and activism which uncovers a new wave of colonialism under the Bamboo Curtain.
Bright, auspicious, and with a voracious taste for the works of Whitman, Dickinson & Burroughs, Shanghai Ivy Yang finds her quiet patriotism thrown into disorder when she falls in love with Huang Fang – once a celebrated poet, now working as a janitor after twenty years in a prison camp for his participation in the Tiananmen Square protests. Huang introduces Ivy to a whole new world, one where freedom dares to cross the party line. When Huang is killed leading a peaceful protest through the city streets, Ivy is arrested and thrown into a farflung PLA concentration camp, fighting to survive day after day amid backbreaking labour and inhumane torture. When she catches the eye of Mo Gwen, the ruthless colonel in charge of the camp, the danger of Xinjiang only grows more personal, and she begins to dream of escape, her will buoyed only by the words of her favourite authors and the memory of Huang and his dream of freedom.
Tracing a worldwide battle of oppression and dissent, tyranny and liberation, Dr. Svet Di-Nahum unveils a sprawling story of the great war of our time. Laureate of the 2022 Cervena Barva Dissident Award and a Ukrainian Panteleimon Kulish International Literary Prize winner for his work defending democracy in Crimea, Di-Nahum brings his surgical brand of fiction to the ongoing repression of freedoms and Uyghur genocides in China, exposing how Beijing’s global web of menace– from Taiwan to Russia– fuels a propaganda state threatening the entire Western world. A work of fiction based on events all too real, Freedom Star draws from a cruel reality often ignored by Western media, painting a deeply human story of how the suffering of one represents the future of all.