Whether it’s fiction, biographical or based on a true story, I love books with human interest. Among my favourites is ‘The War Doctor (Surgery on the Front Line)’ by David Nott (2020), a powerful and intensely moving memoir of an NHS surgeon who volunteered in war zones, operating under the most extreme circumstances. He left the security and stability of his highly paid job as a surgeon in a UK hospital to join the International Medical Corps. He was appointed an OBE in 2012 and received the Robert Burns Humanitarian Award and the Pride of Britain award in 2016. I learned so much from his honest and insightful accounts about the sacrifices that brave people like him make during modern warfare. It is fascinating, eye-opening, harrowing and humbling and it gave me a different perspective on war, medicine and life.
I also found ‘The Prison Doctor’ (2019) by Dr Amanda Brown very interesting. I’ve always found prisons fascinating and love a good prison documentary. Dr Brown trained as a doctor and worked in her own GP surgery but left to join the prison service, working in three prisons over the years. This is a compassionate account of her dealings with devastating events that occurred on a daily basis and true insight into prison life. Hard-hitting but also inspirational, reminding us that these people are human beings and all have a back story which gives you a different perspective compared to the one that first impressions might have given you.
Written in diary form and incorporating the author’s humour, Adam Kay’s ‘This is Going to Hurt’ (2017) is absolute genius! The personal anecdotes are hilarious but at times shocking and heartbreaking! It’s so brilliantly written and captivated me throughout. It also gave me an even greater respect for the junior doctors and other NHS staff.
Among my favourites is ‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’ (2018) by Heather Morris. Sometimes it doesn’t feel right to describe a story like this as a ‘favourite’ but despite the horror of the situation it tells of immense courage and, among the despair, hope and determination.
“Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you” – Louis L’Amour (American Novelist)
Other books, that are either biographical/autobiographical or those based on real events but written as fiction, really interest me. It’s good to hear about events that actually happened even if the characters are made up. ‘The Kite Runner’ (2003) by Khaled Hosseini is an historic fiction novel set in the period of the fall of Afghanistan’s monarchy through the Soviet invasion, the exodus of refugees to Pakistan and the United States, and the rise of the Taliban regime. What was interesting for me personally was that my knowledge of events in Afghanistan are very much from the last two decades whereas this story is set in the 1970s and I learned a lot more about the origins of the conflict over there. This is not one for the faint hearted but it does tell the story of an unlikely friendship between two innocent boys from two very different backgrounds. This book is one of my top ten all-time favourites. I also read ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ (2007) by the same author, also about an unlikely bond formed between two women in tragic circumstances. However there are some pretty graphic aspects in this book that may test your emotional resilience. It’s gritty but, in my view, it is also very important to be aware of the monstrosities that are still an everyday occurrence in some parts of the world.
Like most children of my era, we read ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ in school, one of the most famous accounts of the experience of Jewish people during the Second World War. What I didn’t know was that since then there have been a number of versions of this book, revised and edited in different ways. The one read by school children was more age appropriate than later versions. A graphic adaptation was published in March 1995 that caused some controversy – ‘Anne Frank – The Diary of a Young Girl – The Definitive Edition’. In 2018 our children very kindly paid for a trip to Amsterdam for my birthday gift and I went with my husband in June of that year. The first thing I did after they surprised us was to book tickets to go to Anne Frank’s house, knowing what a popular attraction it is and avoiding the disappointment of not being able to get in. Leading up to the trip I bought a copy of the definite edition of the diary and immersed myself in it. The first thing I noticed was how much it reflected any young girl in terms of writing about friendships, boys, her learning and stories about her family. I remember thinking how much more detail there seemed to be, some of it quite trivial considering the circumstances, but adding to the authenticity of Anne’s age at the time. With all the details so fresh in my mind it added so much more to my experience of visiting the secret attic. As we turned the corner to where the house is we heard the chiming of church bells which gave me goosebumps as I remembered Anne writing about that very sound from her hiding place. It is a surreal and sobering experience and also a privilege to be able to visit the exact spot where this terrible situation unfolded. There are quotes throughout the building and I instantly recognised them all from the book. It’s a memory that will stay with me forever.
‘The Beekeeper of Aleppo’ (2019) by Christy Lefteri is a fictional novel based on the author’s experience of volunteering in Athens at a refugee centre. It is a compassionate, powerful and moving story which takes you off into another world and gives an insight into the plight of refugees. It is also a beautiful love story and is testament to the triumph of the human spirit.
‘Angela’s Ashes – A Memoir of a Childhood’ (1996) by Frank McCourt is a sad and bittersweet memoir of growing up in New York in the 1930s and Ireland in the 1940s. With too many children, too little money and an alcoholic husband/father, it is a story of courage and survival against the odds. Despite the adversity it also contains a lot of humour and I found myself ‘reading it in an Irish accent’!
I love this review posted on Amazon:
“First & foremost, this book taught me that there are levels of poverty. For example, there’s regular poverty, Irish poverty, Irish Catholic poverty, and (worst of all) Irish Catholic poverty in the 1940s.”
The same reviewer also included some of their favourite highlights from the book. Here are just a couple of those:
⁃ “As a child, I thought a balanced diet was bread and tea, a solid and a liquid.”
⁃ “All this time, I’ve been saying Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Evidently, I’ve been saying it wrong. Per the book, it’s…Jesus, Mary and Holy St.Joseph!”
⁃ “Frank’s Mom had a decent sense of humor. Irish Catholic wives were supposed to have children relentlessly. This was her reply after her last baby, Alphie (child no.10!): “Mam says, Alphie is enough. I’m worn out. That’s the end of it. No more children. Dad says, The good Catholic woman must perform her wifely duties and submit to her husband or face eternal damnation. Mam says, As long as there are no more children eternal damnation sounds attractive enough to me.”
‘Philomena’ (2009) by Martin Sixsmith (British author and radio/television presenter) begins in 1950s Ireland and touches on a number of controversial and sensitive themes centred around the Catholic Church, convents for disgraced unmarried mothers, forced adoptions, homophobia, AIDS and a search for truth over many years. Sadly it was a familiar story during a period when women were ostracised by Irish society and often by their own families if they became pregnant outside marriage. To this day, investigations continue into whether or not birth mothers were able to give “full, free and informed” consent for their children to be adopted then, in many cases, such as this one, taken to be raised in America. Steeped in secrecy for seven decades this is just one of many similar stories of the forced separation of mothers and babies, their lives scarred by the forces of hypocrisy on both sides of the Atlantic. I just remember feeling really angry and wound up reading about how these poor women lived in ‘Dickensian’ conditions, often giving birth without the help of a midwife or a doctor and bearing children with a mortality rate in their first year that was five times as high as the country overall.
‘A Piece of Cake’ (2006) by Cupcake Brown is a heart-wrenching autobiography about an eleven year old girl who was orphaned and taken into care (in the USA). This is a particularly poignant subject for me as most of my career has been in Children’s Services and I have a vested interest in children and young people who have suffered childhood trauma and adversity. She was moved from one placement to another, neglected and sexually abused, leading her to a dark world of drug abuse and prostitution to pay for her habits. She experienced the worst of everything life could possibly have thrown at her. You might think ‘why would I want to read that?’ but this story is about her strength and resilience, determination and ultimate triumph in changing her life around. It is an emotional journey and a brutally frank account but also surprisingly funny. Most of all though, it might be the most inspirational book you’ll ever read.
I once read a book called ‘I Choose to Live’ (2005) written by Sabine Dardenne, a Belgian schoolgirl who was the last victim of serial killer Marc Dutroux and one of only two girls who survived. Abducted in 1996, aged 12, she was held captive for 80 days. Inspirational in her strength and determination, she relives her nightmare of sexual abuse (without graphic detail). A moving tale of courage and triumphant survival. Rather than sensationalising the horror, her story is dignified and restrained, and ultimately uplifting. ‘The Dutroux Affair’ shook the whole of Europe and Sabine had three reasons for writing about her experiences –
“I lived through the Dutroux affair from the inside, and all these years I have kept silent about it – about my ‘personal’ Dutroux Affair, my time in the company of the most hated psychopath in Belgium. I need to write this book for three reasons: so that people stop giving me strange looks and treating me like a curiosity; so that no one ever asks me any more questions ever again; and so that the judicial system never again frees a paedophile for ‘good behaviour’.”
I later read ‘Room’ (2010) by Emma Donoghue. This is an extraordinarily powerful story of a mother and child kept in isolation, and the desire for, and price of, freedom. Contrastingly it is a fictional story of abduction. Told through the eyes of a five year old who lives with his mum in a single locked room. They don’t have a key. They are prisoners. Having been born in the room, Jack has never experienced the outside world. His mum has obviously known freedom prior to ‘Room’ and the story shows two different perspectives, from someone who has known freedom and had it taken away and of someone who understands that the world is 11 feet square. It is a very clever insight into the mind of a child who only knows about the outside world from watching the TV.
‘Never Let Me Go’ (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) is one of the few exceptions to my avoidance of science fiction novels, although I didn’t really think of it like that when I read it. I would say more of a dystopian novel of an imagined situation. It’s another that’s hard to describe without giving away ‘spoilers’ so I have ‘borrowed’ this ‘blurb’…..
“Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.”
Interestingly Hailsham is just a few miles from where I live so it’s a real place but a fictional boarding school. Also some scenes from the film adaptation (2020) were shot in my home town of Bexhill! I remember the excitement of Kiera Knightly and Carey Mulligan being in town!
“It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that when I’m in the company of others – even my nearest and dearest – there always comes a moment when I’d rather be reading a book.” – Maureen Corrigan (American author, scholar and literary critic).
Hoping for a Happy Ever After 