Bounsang Khamkeo, a Laotian civil servant, was arrested on trumped-up charges in June 1981 and left to rot in a series of re-education - that is, death - camps for seven years, three months and four days. It's impossible to read his tale of struggle and redemption without being profoundly moved.

What, even the most insensate reader must wonder, would former US national security adviser Dr Henry Kissinger - sometime architect of the secret bombing campaign that devastated large swathes of Laos during the Vietnam war - think should he happen to read I Little Slave, especially now that human rights groups are seeking to bring him to trial? Bounsang was just one of millions whose life was all but destroyed by the shifting quagmire of geo-politics. His heart-rending story raises many questions, not all of them exclusively applicable to 1973 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kissinger. Above all, I Little Slave provokes rage at injustice in general, not just at that visited on Bounsang, but for all the innocent victims of war.

Patriotically determined to help his country after studying in France, Bounsang joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and continued to work for the government after the Pathet Lao seized power in 1975, only to fall victim to the machinations of a greedy, amoral and power-hungry colleague, one Somphavan Inthavong.

Bounsang's incarceration, at first only a short distance from his former office in Vientiane, and later in the samana, or gulag, on the Vietnamese border, was marked by mental and physical torture. Starved, denied medical treatment, cut off from the outside world, it was only his resolve to survive and denounce Laos' criminal regime that kept him going.

The cruelties exacted on the death camps' inmates - where regulations forbade even whispering, laughing and singing - pale beside their super-human determination to carry on some form of normal existence. Those granted the 'privilege' of performing slave labour outside the camp managed to trade with local farmers, getting a little extra food to aid their survival. Forced to conduct self-criticism sessions for their supposed crimes, the prisoners injected a note of irony into their confessions, the defiance boosting their morale. With enormous courage, and knowing their captors had the power of life and death over them, they even called a protest meeting to try to establish their rights. Bounsang's well-paced narrative, at times poetic and extraordinarily restrained, is all the better for its lack of bitterness.

If Bounsang was heroic, then the book's heroine is his wife, Viengsavanh, who never let up in her quest to free her husband, succoured and nurtured their children, and refused to be browbeaten by corrupt officials, who accepted the food parcels she addressed to Bounsang, but never passed them on, and tried to coerce her into having sex with them.

I Little Slave takes its title from the traditional form of address used by Laotians to elders and superiors. Banned by the communist regime for being feudal, it was re-introduced in the prison camps as a method of further humiliating the inmates, who would have to call out to their guards: 'I, little slave, am going to the toilet'. When Bounsang was finally released and returned home, the wheel had come full circle, and his wife's employees formally referred to themselves as kha noi - little slaves.

This book isn't without minor flaws. It strays into politics - unnecessarily, considering this is an autobiography - and Bounsang's reunion with his sons in the US, who had fled before his release, is inexplicably covered in just two lines. He, his wife and daughters escaped Laos in 1989. His first thought as he stepped on foreign soil was, 'Now it's my turn to tell the truth'. They live in Vancouver, Washington, while his nemesis, Somphavan, reportedly occupies a luxury villa on the outskirts of Vientiane.

How Bounsang arrived in the US so swiftly, and how he became reconciled to life abroad, in the same country as Kissinger, is another tale that needs to be told.