Darkness at Noon

Darkness at Noon,
a novel by A. Koestler , published 1940 , translated from German.

It deals with the arrest, imprisonment, trial, and execution of N. S. Rubashov in an unnamed dictatorship over which ‘No. 1’ presides. Koestler describes Rubashov as ‘a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow trials’, and the novel did much to draw attention to the nature of Stalin's regime.