Kylie Moore-Gilbert reclaims her life with startling Iranian prison memoir

To prisoners, the sky is the only free thing: they can look up beyond the confining walls and see the expanse that stretches past their cage into the unattainable life outside.

It’s a perception often found among the reflections of those who escape to tell their tale: Michelle Knight spoke of seeing the sky beyond the rooms where she and two other girls were held captive by a suburban psychopath for years. Jacob Rosenberg wrote of a small green plant that he saw yearning from the damp wall towards the feeble light of a high window in the concentration camp where the Nazis had him.

As an academic specialising in Islamic studies, she attended a conference in Iran and was arrested at Teheran airport as she was returning to Australia. Accused of being a spy, ostensibly because her husband was an Israeli citizen, she was sentenced to 10 years by one of Iran’s most notorious judges. The carrot dangled before her was freedom to return home, but the price demanded was that she should use her academic role as a Middle Eastern expert to spy for the Iranian government.

Moore-Gilbert is able to make some solid friendships among other imprisoned women, whose “crimes” are as false and nebulous as her own: Niloufar is a conservationist, Hoda a human rights lawyer, Elena a high-ranking executive who knew too much. When these kind and wise women are transferred away to another jail, Kylie is bereft.

So inspiring. No matter how much she got thrown at her she pushed through

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