Best books about gulag prison camp life

Start with Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum — the definitive account of the camp system, built on archives and survivors' testimony. It gives you the whole picture before you read any single memoir.

Then, depending on what you want:

• A first-hand memoir: Twenty Years in a Siberian Gulag (Kolyma) or Journey into the Whirlwind — the classic account of arrest, interrogation and the camps.
• A literary voice: Kolyma Stories by Varlam Shalamov — spare, devastating short stories from someone who lived it.
• Faith under pressure: With God in Russia, a priest's 23 years in Soviet prisons and camps.
• Voices beyond the famous ones: Gulag Voices (edited by Applebaum) and Remembering the Darkness, on women's experience.
• How the system worked: Gulag Boss, a memoir by a camp administrator, and Labor Camp Socialism for the scholarly view.