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THE CHOICE by Edith Eger Rider, £14.99

DYNAMIC psychologist Dr Edith Eger is still practising at the age of 89. That alone makes her a remarkable woman but her extraordinary life story, and the way she has channelled it to help others, make for an unforgettable memoir.

Eger was a Jew whose family lived in Hungary until they were sent to the Auschwitz death camp in March 1944 when she was 16. She writes that if she could sum up her life in one moment, it would be “three women in dark wool coats, wait, arms linked, in a barren yard”. The women are Eger, her sister Magda and their mother, who was immediately murdered in the gas chambers by the Nazis. Her father was gassed too.

Eger loved to dance and had trained to compete as a gymnast for the Hungarian Olympic team. So when Josef Mengele came to the barracks seeking entertainment, her fellow inmates by Omar El Akkad Picador, £14.99 OMAR El Akkad’s debut novel is a worryingly feasible dystopian portrait of a United States at war with itself in the not-too-distant future.

American War is set towards the end of the 21st century and the beginning of the 22nd, depicting a world in which a second American Civil War breaks out amid the widespread planetary destruction wrought by climate change.

Wide swathes of the US are already submerged, volunteered her to dance. She danced the waltz to the tune of The Blue Danube while Mengele discussed which of the girls in her barracks should be killed next.

“I was so scared,” she said. But she was rewarded with bread which she shared with her fellow prisoners.

At the end of the war Edith was pulled, almost dead, from a heap of corpses. She weighed 60lb, her back was broken and she was suffering from typhus.

Shortly after the war, she met a fellow Hungarian Jew who had fought the Nazis. They married and moved to America where she trained to become a psychologist. She appeared to embody the American dream but it took decades for Eger to resolve the terrible experiences she had suffered.

In 1985 she visited Auschwitz for the first time since her imprisonment. By confronting her past and paying her respects to her parents where they died, she started to make peace with her experiences and learnt to heal.

What makes Eger’s book so exceptional is that not only does it tell of her life in the concentration camp, it also portrays how difficult life was for Holocaust survivors