Few Australian prisoners of the Japanese in World War II escaped from custody, but Penrod Dean was one of those few. A lieutenant in the Second AIF he was among the thousands captured at the fall of Singapore. Dean and a fellow serviceman escaped from Changi POW camp in 1942. Neither man knew it at the time, but their adventures and their tribulations were just beginning.

While on the run they had to deal with friendly and unfriendly natives, fell in with a Chinese Communist guerilla group, with whom they took part in raids against the Japanese, and then moved on, alone in the jungles of Malaya. Eventually they were betrayed to their enemies, tortured and sentenced to three years solitary confinement at the notorious Outram Road prison in Singapore. While in prison they were tortured most horribly, both physically and psychologically, and fortunate to survive in circumstances where few did.

Incredibly, Dean painstakingly made himself a set of false teeth while in captivity, and even learnt of the birth of his first child. (He didn't even know that his wife was pregnant when he left Australia!) And perhaps more incredibly still, he taught himself Japanese while in solitary confinement...indeed he learnt it so well the he worked as a translator after his release back to Changi, towards the end of the war and in its aftermath. After the war, Penrod Dean was one of ten Australians chosen to go to Japan and appear as a witness at the Major War Trials.

Singapore Samurai is an honest account of these remarkable experiences. While Dean does not shy away from the terrible cruelty that was part of POW life, his book also details small victories born of courage and perseverance and is, above all, a testament the resilience of the spirit and the power of comradeship under the most trying conditions.