This is a unique collection of writings - poems, essays, memoirs and brief histories - from women all over the world expressing their experience of war, torture and violence, their defiance and resistance, and the fight for justice. The terrible conequences of war are vividly recounted in recollections of life in Bosnia, being bombed in Iraq, or a refugee camp in Jordan. We hear from women surviving imprisonment, such as Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and Nawal El Sa'adawi, arrested in Egypt for her feminist politics. The works of Taslima Nassrin explore domestic violence. Nelly Sachs's poignant poem recreates the voice of a dead child of Auschwitz, while the Greek writer Elsa Spartioti relives childhood memories of political violence in a country torn apart by war. From the voice Anna Akhmatova and her rendition of the Stalinist terror to the writing of Nadine Gordimer fighting apartheid in South Africa, the verse of Adrienne Rich adn the diary of Anne Frank, this inspirational anthology is not only a moving witness to human tragedy but also shows the important of the written word in the universal struggle for human rights...