MUST READS

Out now in paperback

THE MOUNTBATTENS: THEIR LIVES AND LOVES by Andrew Lownie

(Blink £10.99, 496pp) HE WAS a royal with filmstar looks; she was the richest heiress in the world. The marriage of Louis Mountbatten to Edwina Ashley in July 1922 was a fabulous alliance, yet as Mountbatten later remarked, ‘Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds.’

Mountbatten’s sonorous list of roles included Supreme Commander of Allied forces in South-East Asia during World War II and mentor to both Prince Philip and Prince Charles.

This impeccably researched joint biography is an enthralling portrait of two complex individuals whose public and private lives were somewhat inextricably entwined.

MY NAME IS WHY by Lemn Sissay

(Canongate £9.99, 224pp) THE poet Lemn Sissay spent 18 years in care — at first with foster parents, who rejected him, and then in local authority homes.

In 2015, he obtained the official records of his childhood: four thick folders told his story, from his birth in 1967 in an institution for unmarried mothers, to 1984 when, aged 17, he moved into a development appropriately named Poets’ Corner.

The records exposed the authorities’ cruel treatment of a sensitive and intelligent boy, which eventually drove him to breakdown.

Lemn, the Amharic name his Ethiopian birth mother gave him, means Why.

This powerful memoir asks that question with unflinching clarity.

GIRL by Edna O’Brien

(Faber £8.99, 240pp) ‘I WAS a girl once, but not any more’ is the haunting opening to Edna O’Brien’s 19th novel.

In 2014, 276 girls were kidnapped from their school in Chibok, Nigeria. O’Brien subsequently visited to meet survivors whose terrible stories inspired a novel that is a record of atrocity, but also a testament to the courage of those girls.

O’Brien’s narrator Maryam is repeatedly raped.

She is forcibly married and bears a daughter, and when at last she returns home, she and her daughter are rejected by her own family.

Though its events are harrowing, Girl beautifully depicts the grace and tenderness of which Maryam never quite loses sight.