Ten years ago, she was living happily as a North Oxford mother and wife of history don Michael Aris. Now there are fears for the health of Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest in Burma since July 2003. This photograph shows her speaking at a pro-democracy rally in February, 2003, shortly before she was detained by Burma's military regime.

Her story features in the final chapter of The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma, by Thant Myint-U. The grandson of UN secretary-general U Thant, he left Burma after briefly joining the rebel fighters in the 1988 uprising. Suu Kyi had left her young sons and husband in Oxford for a brief visit to Burma, but stayed to become a pro-democracy leader. The generals agreed to an open election in 1990, but when Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won, they refused to accept the results and locked her up, along with hundreds of members of her party.

The author, himself a former UN peacekeeper, starts the story as the British warships chug up the River Irrawaddy to colonise the country in 1855 - a scene familiar to readers of Amitav Ghosh's fictional Glass Palace. Thant Myint-U ends not on a note of despair but of warning. He believes that economic sanctions have deepened the country's isolation from democracy, and that only opening the country to trade can pave the way for political change into a stable civil society.