A Day and a Night and a Day, By Glen Duncan

Glen Duncan sets the scene, crisply, creeply and most evocatively, as Augustus Rose is led into an interrogation room, for a day and a night and a day (of the title) for his torture, before yielding the names demanded by his interrogators.

It is not just the political ramifications that make this book so shocking and current - Rose is in a non-legitimate American facility in Morocco that Duncan appears to have fashioned out of resonances of Abu Ghraib - but its use of language, and memory (particularly's Rose's remembrance of a fiery love affair) that makes the story so startling and original.