Non-fiction
Infidel
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The daughter of a political opponent of the Somali dictatorship, Ayaan Hirsi Ali grew up surrounded by her family in exile. Her traditional upbringing continued from Somalia to Saudi Arabia and then t…
Stolen Voices
Zlata Filipovic and Melanie Challenger
In 1992 Zlata Filipovic found herself caught in the siege of Sarajevo. The diary that she had begun as a carefree twelve year old became a war diary – a record of the devastation that was unfolding ar…
The Girl with Nine Wigs
Sophie van der Stap
“It’s Saturday and everything is different. No, I didn’t go to the market this morning and I didn’t have my usual coffee on Westerstraat. And no, I wasn’t getting ready for a new semester at college….
The Road of Lost Innocence
Somaly Mam
Somaly Mam’s life story is an unforgettable and inspiring story of triumph over unthinkable adversity. Written in exquisite, spare, unflinching prose, The Road of Lost Innocence recounts the experienc…
A Life Less Ordinary
Baby Halder
Written on a notepad in moments snatched between her domestic duties, Baby Halder’s memoir recounts the hardships and struggles of her life as a poor woman in India; her mother walked out when she was…
The Courage to Leave
Diaryatou Bah
Diaryatou was born in 1985 in Guinea. One of 32 children (her father had four wives), at the age of two she was sent to live with her grandparents in a little village “on the edge of the world,” where…
In Defence of the Enlightenment
Tzvetan Todorov
Two and a half centuries ago, a generation of men grew up with the exhilarating belief that the world could be explored and explained with man-created tools and adventurous minds over which no God had…
The Apostles of Beauty
Tzvetan Todorov
Although they may sound strange today, Dostoevsky’s famous words were once taken at face value. In the wake of 19th century Romanticism, several generations of writers did believe that through their l…
In the Name of Honour
Mukhtar Mai
For the first time, Mukhtar Mai recounts her ordeal in this moving memoir. A story of extreme suffering and humiliation, it is also one of immense courage and faith. Mukhtar Mai is thirty five years o…
The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality
André Comte-Sponville
In all Western traditions, be it Jewish, Muslim or Christian, God has become synonymous with spirituality. In this remarkable essay, André Comte-Sponville argues that a demanding personal ethic does n…