Award-winning journalist John Beck recounts China's persecution of the predominantly Muslim minorities in Xinjiang and its relentless pursuit of the few who escaped beyond its borders. Through intertwined literary narratives combined with snippets of original source material, including official directives and speeches, he pieces together the individual stories of what consecutive American administrations have described as genocide.

The narrative moves from China to Kazakhstan, Turkey and the US, incorporating the tensions, discrimination, and occasional violence that characterised life in Xinjiang for decades. But when Xi Jinping is appointed President in 2013, the creeping repression quickly escalates into a crackdown of unprecedented scope and severity.

Beck follows 4 characters: a Kazakh writer and an Uyghur nurse who survived re-education camps before ultimately escaping abroad, a human rights advocate involved in securing their release, and an inadvertent exile spied on by Chinese authorities as his family back home was used as leverage against him.

Through their stories, the book explores identity, dehumanization, and censorship, the force of literature in dark times, and an all-pervasive apparatus of repression able to exist within miles of the White House.

John Beck lived in Istanbul for a number of years, where he was in close contact with the city's Uyghur diaspora and wrote on the crackdown and related issues for publications including Harper's and National Geographic. Some of that work forms the basis of this book along with further reporting from Almaty, Kazakhstan, Virginia, and New York.