8vo. 192pp. With half-title. Original publisher's red cloth, lettered in gilt to spine, with original printed yellow paper dust-wrapper. Some light spotting and occasional slight chipping to edges of dust-wrapper. Contemporary inked ownership inscription of 'E.S.C, ?' dated 1963 to head of FFEP. Internally clean and crisp.

The first edition in English of the first novel by Soviet and Russian writer and Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), widely considered to be the first depiction of Stalinist repressions published and distributed in the Soviet Union. The novel's plot, drawn from Solzhenitsyn's own experiences of imprisonment in Stalin's Gulag system, follows a day in the life of the titular prisoner, who has been falsely accused of espionage and sentenced to a decade of forced labour. The novel was immensely controversial across the Soviet Union; it was highly praised by First Secretary Khrushchev, but following his violent removal by Brezhnev, Solzhenitsyn's books were uniformly banned across the state, with the writer stripped of citizenship and exiled shortly thereafter.