MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

NO WALL TOO HIGH by Xu Hongci

(Rider £8.99) AS A young Communist activist in Fifties Shanghai, Xu Hongci was appalled by the brutal violence with which Mao’s dictates were enforced, but he told himself: ‘If I want to be a revolutionary, I will have to toughen up.’

It was advice that would serve him well — although not in the way he expected. In 1957, he was denounced, expelled from the party and sent to a labour camp — even his beloved girlfriend turned on him.

Starving, tortured and beaten, he made three attempts to escape, before finally succeeding in 1972.

Of some 550,000 people sentenced to labour camps in 1957-8, he is the only one known to have escaped. He was rehabilitated in 1982, and his memoir is a record of courage and endurance that stands alongside the works of Jung Chang.

THE APPOINTMENT by Dr Graham Easton

(Robinson £9.99) YOU have a persistent cough, a nagging pain, a rash that won’t go away.

After a couple of weeks, you make an appointment to see the GP, just to be on the safe side.

You know what you want from the encounter: an assurance that it is nothing to worry about.

But what goes through your doctor’s mind in that ten-minute consultation? Dr Graham Easton is a GP and broadcaster and, in this revealing and entertaining book, he goes through a GP’s morning, describing 18 typical appointments, based on real case studies.

As patients, we are too preoccupied with our own worries to wonder about our GP’s state of mind, but the unusual perspective of this book gives the other side of the story: the ‘uneasy blend of anxiety and excitement, like preshow tension for an actor’ with which each encounter with a new patient begins.

WE WERE WARRIORS by Capt Johnny Mercer

(Pan £8.99) ‘I remember little of my childhood,’ writes Johnny Mercer. It is a bleak opening line for a memoir that encompasses the extremes of emotion, from early unhappiness to living with terror on active service in Afghanistan and experiencing post-trauma stress.

After a difficult upbringing in a strict religious home where his father was angry and unpredictable, Mercer joined the Army and served three tours of duty in Afghanistan.

Elected as a Conservative MP in 2015, he is driven by a fierce self-knowledge (and fierce contempt for the self-important types he encounters in the Army and Tory central office).

His powerful memoir gives a devastating account of the fear, confusion and comradeship of close combat, but is pierced with moments of deep tenderness for both his young family and old comrades.