Over the next 11 years, Parnell was subjected to unthinkable sessions of torture, many of them because of unimaginable bureaucratic bungles by Foreign Affairs and Australian Consulate staff. Left to starve and fight every day for his survival, Parnell became a man forced to eat everything from cockroaches to human flesh. This is a story of fatalism and bureaucracy, of corruption and the horrors of prison, but most of all it is a no-holds-barred account of what the human spirit can endure.