Prisoner of Tehran (2007)

A LIFE SENTENCE Spared from death in Iran only by agreeing to marry her interrogator, Nemet now tells her story in a memoir

At 16, Marina Nemat was arrested by two of Ayatollah Khomeini's soldiers. It was 1982, the height of the Iranian revolution. A devout Christian, she was deemed ''a danger to Islamic society'' for demanding that government propaganda be kept out of the classroom. Thrown in prison, she was beaten and sentenced to death, and most certainly would have been executed had one of her interrogators not spared her life — on the condition that she convert to Islam and marry him. Told in a simple, unsentimental style, Prisoner of Tehran is an extraordinary story of survival and how one woman finally found inner peace through the written word. A-