Few may realise that the leader of Turkmenistan – a man who once renamed bread after his own mother – wrote his own holy book, which is required reading before taking a driving test. It is a book of such time-quaking importance that the month of September was renamed in its honour. Countless historians have dedicated decades of their lives to minutely detailing the atrocities perpetrated by the twentieth century’s most notorious dictators. And yet one area of tyrannical infamy has been shockingly neglected – these men’s crimes against literature. Between them, they produced theoretical works, spiritual manifestos, poetry collections, memoirs and even the occasional romance novel, establishing a literary tradition of soul-crushing tedium that continues to this day.What do these books reveal about the dictatorial soul? How did the production of literature become central to the running of their regimes? A journey to the end of the literary night, combining mind-bending explorations of the avant-garde of boredom with history, politics and biography – and leavened with a darkly humorous wit – Dictator Literature is the true story of the worst books in the world.