In the summer of 2009, three American hikers in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq crossed the unmarked border into Iran and were taken captive by Iranian border guards. They were Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Josh Fattal. 

This was a dicey moment in Iranian domestic politics. It was around the time that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected in a violent display of civil conflict at the polls. Some voters and backers of opposition candidates were killed or beaten by thugs.

Tensions between Iran, and the United States and Israel were going through another bad patch, and Iran’s relations with many Western nations were deteriorating as Ahmadinejad reiterated his country’s goal of becoming a nuclear power and dismissed the Holocaust as a Jewish hoax.

Fattal’s father was an Iraqi Jew who had grown up in Israel and lived in the United States most of his life. Fattal writes that his father was born in Basra, Iraq, in 1948 and was airlifted to Israel in 1951 during Operations Ezra and Nehemiah. Fattal is an American citizen. Bauer and Shourd are not Jewish.

All three were in their adventurous 20s. They had done what a number of people curious about the societies of the Middle East would like to do: They had been living in the area, teaching, writing and mostly hanging out with young Arabs in cities like Damascus before the Syrian civil war broke out.

When taken prisoner, all three – wisely, under the circumstances – told their Iranian captors that they sympathized with the Palestinians and had little empathy for Israeli policies in the territories taken in the Six-Day War in 1967.

As they found out, being a hiker who innocently crosses a mountainous border into Iran and carries an American passport is a perilous thing to do. They quickly got caught up in what we euphemistically call the politics of the Middle East. A reader may ask: Why didn’t the Iranian soldiers just return the hikers to the Iraqi side of the border and call it a day?

Things apparently aren’t so simple in the Iranian military. Once the soldiers contacted their superiors with what they had found – the three hikers – those officers immediately had to ask whether Fattal, Bauer and Shourd were CIA agents or who knows what. From that point, the book takes off with the three Americans telling the story of their imprisonment, being blindfolded, questioned and being required to write their life histories. 

It became evident pretty early on that the Iranians didn’t know what to make of their American captives. Their own mind-set was that any Americans caught in such circumstances had to be spies. Yet that clearly made no sense – or did it? What a great cover for three foreign agents: posing as hikers.

The book is set up as the three give accounts of their capture and the early, frightening days of their imprisonment, before things more or less settled down into predictable routines. At the outset, Fattal, Bauer and Shourd agreed to go on hunger strikes until they could see each other regularly.

Their plight here may remind the reader of a game called Prisoners Dilemma, in which prisoners who cannot communicate with each other are told lies by their guards to make them break their pacts with each other. The guards eventually mislead them into thinking the others have broken their hunger strike just to get them to eat. 

At one point, Shourd is questioned by an English-speaking interrogator who apparently didn’t know much about the United States.

“Sarah, you say you a teacher. Have you even been to the Pentagon?”

“No, I’ve never even been to Washington, D.C.”

“Please, Sarah, tell the truth. How can you 

be a teacher, an educated person, and never go to the Pentagon? Describe to us just the lobby.”

“I’ve never been to the Pentagon. Teachers don’t go to the Pentagon!” I want to ask him if he’s ever left Iran, or if he even has a notion of what Iran is like outside this paranoid cabal. At times their questions are so absurd, I almost have to stop myself from laughing, partially because I’m weak from not eating and partially because I can’t really convince myself this nightmare is real. 

Equally Kafkaesque questions rain down on Fattal during one encounter with his interrogator.

“Deplorable means bad,” I answer my interrogator. “When I say Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is deplorable, I am saying Israel treats the Palestinians badly.” I am acting civilly, but I want to scream at them, “I am not the enemy you think I am!” Why are they asking me about the Palestinians? We both oppose American support of Israel. But these guys don’t care. To them, I’m an American, and America threatens to attack Iran. America slaps sanctions on them, supports Middle East dictators, bombs their neighbors, and arms the Israelis. To them, I am my government.

Shourd was held for 14 months, the two men for two years. During their captivity, Shourd and Bauer decided to marry. They even found ways to make love while behind bars – when their guards at the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran weren’t paying attention.

This book moves along well, its voice shifting among the three narrators, putting the reader into the cell or blindfolded in an interrogation room, sitting on a chair.

A map of the Iran-Iraq border where they were captured would have been welcome, as would a map of Tehran that pinpoints Evin Prison.

In the final pages, the three prisoners recount their experiences from the distance of time passing. Shourd is on Facebook, exchanging greetings and memories with one of her early captors. Fattal has been warned that he should avoid the Middle East, small spaces and armed guards lest he evoke anxieties from his imprisonment.

When he arrives at Ben Gurion Airport outside Tel Aviv, he’s immediately pulled aside and held in confinement. An Israeli interrogator begins to question him: “What is your purpose for entering our country? Are you Jewish?”

“This again,” writes Fattal, showing the parallels between at least two Middle Eastern countries  – Israel and Iran – when it comes to foreigners.

“A Sliver of Light” is a compelling read all the way through, another window into what we blithely call the politics of the Middle East.