One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I read this whilst working at a grim factory job, initially thinking "Ugh, this is the worst thing to be reading given my circumstances". The more I read though, the more I realized it was exactly what I should be reading (to illustrate that the bad things weren't specific to the place, they just sprang from human nature in dire situations)

I picked it up as part of idea to buy novellas to try to get myself back into reading books (which mostly worked).