During my flu season I have been reading Tina Thunander's "Travelling in Sharialand. A report on women's lives in Saudi Arabia". Tina is quite lost when she lands in the kingdom, but is soon given a lesson in the state of affairs by the Ministry of Information's envoy.
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Morning in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa, can be seen as a contribution to the infected Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and as an outside media consumer it is difficult to understand all aspects of it. However, it is not difficult to follow the protagonist Amal and how her increasingly decimated family makes its way through decades of conflict, war, displacement and refugeeism.
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I started reading Sarah's Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay, and then I didn't want to put it down. When the French police knock on Sarah's family's door in Paris in 1942, she hides her little brother in the closet, locks the door and puts the key in her pocket ...
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I have just read, and can recommend, Niceville by Kathryn Stockett. The book follows three women, the white socialite Skeeter and the two black maids Aibileen and Minny, in the American South in the 1960s.
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Here is a book tip that is also a film tip. Li Cunxin grows up as a poor peasant boy in communist China. His family barely has enough food for the day, but he learns early on that, thanks to Chairman Mao, he lives in the richest country in the world. Imagine how terrible the people in the capitalist world must be!
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Even silence has an end is Ingrid Betancourt's account of her time in the hands of the FARC guerrillas. For six years, the French-Colombian politician was a prisoner in the Colombian jungle. This is a book that kept me hooked from the first page to the last.
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The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, is a different book in many ways. The story is narrated by Death and is set in Nazi Germany, but as if Nazi Germany is just something going on in the background. If you are a nine-year-old girl, you have nothing to compare it to and Nazi Germany is quite normal.
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Purge, by Sofi Oksanen, is a literary masterpiece. Every now and then you meet writers who can master the language, but mastering the narrative is an art. In this book we meet an old woman in the Estonian countryside. She chases flies and makes pickles. Suddenly she sees a bundle in the garden - is it a person?
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If there's one group of people we're prejudiced against, it's the gypsies, isn't it? That is why it is particularly interesting to read the book Bury Me Standing. Isabel Fonseca is an American journalist who has lived with gypsies in Eastern Europe and has made a serious attempt to understand their history.
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With books you can travel to places you would otherwise never go. This time: Chechnya. What drives Åsne Seierstad, a 24-year-old newly graduated journalist, to hitchhike on a military plane from Moscow to the war in Chechnya? Perhaps more foolhardy than brave, but it is fascinating!
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