This surpassingly humanitarian collection of fiction features stories of political resistance against some of the most malignant governmental regimes of the century. The 22 contributors speak from Asia, Africa, the U.K., South America, and from history – from the former Soviet Union under Stalin, and from Germany on the cusp of the Second World War. The largely first-person tales read like first-rate reportage, free of postmodern preening and McMemoir sentiment. They’re rigorous, insistent, and hard to ignore. But this is not because the stories take us to the Earth’s every corner of systematized damnation – it’s because the writing is skilled and deft.

God’s Spies deserves to be read by the very people whom it might pass by: people who marvel at fine writing, people who wish to explore the human landscape of faraway cultures, and people who’ve forgotten the breadth of human courage. That the book triumphs on so many levels is a testament to the sagacity of editor Alberto Manguel, the Calgary-based anthologist and essayist. Manguel sets himself a difficult, militant agenda: to convey to the reader that words can not only bear witness to injustice but can also construct a bulwark of human expression against institutionalized evil. And in his task Manguel succeeds. Ten pages into the first story – Vladimir Nabokov’s “Tyrants Destroyed” – the reader is both humbled (by the degree of hideousness that other people must endure) and strengthened (Nabokov lets the reader make a wonderful, mysterious discovery: that good, truthful writing can alchemize inconceivable evil into a victory).

Other writers included in the collection are Ken Saro-Wiwa (Nigeria), Sean O’Faolain (Ireland), Wang Meng (China), Bessie Head (South Africa), Anna Seghers (Germany), Isaac Babel (Russia), Antonio Skarmeta (Chile), and Iran’s Reza Baraheni, whose stunning, hallucinatory fable about torture, “Dismemberment,” is reason alone to read this book.