When Tig Hague kissed goodbye to his fiancee, Lucy, he was already thinking of his return. The couple were going house-hunting, looking for their first home together. Tig was only going to be gone a few days on a routine business trip - the annual highlight of an otherwise unglamorous job working on the Russian desk of a London bank.
But just hours later something went wrong at Moscow airport. Very wrong.
Misunderstanding a request from customs for a backhander to speed his progress into the country, Tig was pulled to one side to have his bag searched. No more than a deliberate inconvenience, he thought.
But Tig's world was about to implode with dizzying, terrifying speed. A tiny lump of hashish, nothing more than detritus from a recent stag weekend, was discovered in the pocket of an old pair of jeans. Too small to warrant anything more than a slapped wrist back home, he hadn't even known it was there.
Tig was in Moscow's Piat Centrale jail by nightfall - and that was just a stepping stone on his way to a prison camp in Zone 22 of the bleak, remote wastes of Mordova.
He wouldn't be returning home for years . . .
Zone 22 is the shocking story of a young Englishman's struggle to survive the brutal, corrupt, almost medieval conditions of a prison camp in Putin's Russia - a gripping contemporary story in the tradition of Papillon and Midnight Express.