I've blogged about this before, but here are some updates. We read a lot when we travel, and I like it best when I can read books from the part of the world I'm travelling in. I actually wish bookshops were sorted like that, by location in the world.
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Göran Rosenbergs tells the story of his father, who miraculously survived the Holocaust and Auschwitz. In the unnatural environment in which he happened to find himself as a young man, death is the most reasonable thing and anyone who defies that fate is a miracle in themselves. In fact, long before he is conceived, both of Göran's parents succeed in this almost impossible endeavour.
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Another book I read when we were in the Philippines was Johan Persson and Martin Schibbye's book 438 Days. This is their account of their imprisonment in an Ethiopian prison, after they entered the Ogaden to do a report on Lundin Oil.
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We did a lot of reading during our holiday in the Philippines, and one of the books I read was The East End Midwife. Jennifer Worth worked in the 1950s as a midwife and nurse in the poorest parts of London, and this is her memoir.
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North Korea is a country that many consider to be a huge prison in itself. Inside that country are closely guarded detention centres housing hundreds of thousands of prisoners. And inside those camps are underground prisons... American journalist Blaine Harden has written the unlikely story of Shin Dong-hyuk's escape from Camp 14, which eventually took him all the way to South Korea and the United States.
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Dream Heart, by Cecilia Samartin, is a moving and beautiful story from Cuba. It follows two cousins, Nora and Alicia, who grow up together in Cuba in the 1950s. They live a sheltered and privileged existence, with the black maid Beba and the Catholic nuns at school. When Castro comes to power, their lives are turned upside down.
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Silvia Avallone's debut novel depicts a very different Italy from the one we see on our holidays. There are no vines or beaches with colourful umbrellas in the background. Instead, the world pulses around the steelworks, where the intense heat is slamming, and where someone occasionally loses a hand.
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I have just finished reading Barbara Demicks' fascinating book on North Korea. Ms Demicks is a journalist and has been to North Korea herself, but the book is not based on her own visit. Foreign guests are shown a carefully planned backdrop of perfection on rigidly guided tours of the capital Pyongyang, and Demicks wanted to get behind that backdrop. She chose to set the story in the northern city of Chongjin, and based the story on the lives of a number of North Korean defectors.
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The island is a microscopic speck in the Pacific Ocean. The beaches are white, the sea is endless and the islanders dance for the tourists whenever a boat happens to pass by. This is the real paradise - or is it? The island belongs to the British colonial power, and although British culture feels more than remote, British law applies. Suspicions of sexual abuse lead to the arrival of three British social workers to investigate.
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My Life as a Traitor, by Zarah Ghahramani, is about the then 20-year-old Zarah's time in an Iranian prison. Terrible, it may seem, and it is. But the most interesting thing is to read about the journey there: growing up in a middle-class Iranian family, university studies and teenage life with ordinary girl talk about boys and love and clothes, with the only difference being that the mullahs' religious rules are everywhere like a shadow.
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