MUST READS
Out now in paperback
I AM MALALA By Malala Yousafzai (Indigo £7.99)
IT IS perhaps no surprise that as a child Nobel Prizewinner Malala Yousafzai drank up the conversation and political debates enjoyed by the men around her.
Growing up in Pakistan she was ‘hypnotised by this talk of the big world beyond our valley’, but saw her future would be limited simply because she was a girl. It helped that she was adored by her father and he wanted her to live ‘as free as a bird’.
When she was ten, the Taliban took control of the region, forbidding girls to attend school. Against a backdrop of gunfire, she spoke out against their diktat and was shot on her way home one day.
Her inspiring book — this teen edition is retold for her own generation — reveals not only her motivations for becoming an education activist but also the complexities of being wellknown yet lonely and the sadness of her refugee family yearning for their homeland.
BLOODLANDS By Timothy Snyder (Vintage £10.99)
MASS kil l i ng in mid- 2 0 t h century history most commonly makes us think of the Holocaust of World War II.
Stories of the concentration camps have survived thanks to the many novels and memoirs written by survivors, but for Yale historian Snyder the picture they paint is ‘too simple and clean’.
The focus of this disturbing and detailed work is the Nazi and Soviet regimes that murdered 14 million civilians and prisoners in the ‘bloodlands’ of the title — a stretch between central Poland and Western Russia — from 1933 to 1945. Most of those killed were women, children and the infirm.
Their deaths were a result of the brutal policies of Hitler and Stalin, beginning with a famine engineered by Stalin in the Ukraine and continuing after Hitler betrayed him, when the Germans besieged Leningrad.
A shocking and important reminder of the lesserknown victims of the worst 20th-century despots.
DOUBLING BACK By Linda Cracknell (Freight Books £8.99)
THIS lyrical travelogue is a collection of both ambles and treks one woman has made over eight years, in the UK and abroad. Above all, it is a tribute to her love of walking as she retraces the paths she and others have trodden before.
Returning to Boscastle in Cornwall, she recalls spending a holiday there aged 17 and discovering that Thomas Hardy visited as a young architect and fell in love with a girl who was exploring the black-top cliffs and hanging valleys on horseback.
Cracknell’s curiosity to find out more about her father who died when she was a child leads her to Switzerland as she follows the trail he took as a mountaineer.
From Kenya to the Cairngorms, her writing is vivid and makes you feel as though you’re sitting next to her by a campfire, eating chocolate and comparing blisters.