Set in Moscow, Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle follows the fate of Gleb Nerzhin, his scientist colleagues and fellow prisoners and how they negotiate the horrors of Soviet Russia in the years following WWII. Like his protagonist, the author was a mathematician forced to work in a Stalinist-era prison run as a research institute. Solzhenitsyn was the winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature.  (RUS260, $16.95)