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  August in Kabul - America's last...

  Andrew Quilty

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  Told through the eyes of witnesses to the fall of Kabul, Walkley award-winning journalist Andrew Quilty's debut publication offers a remarkable record of this historic moment. 
  As night fell on 15 August 2021, the Taliban entered Kabul, capital of Afghanistan. After a 20-year conflict with the United States, its Western allies and a proxy Afghan government, the Islamic militant group once aligned with al Qaeda was about to bury yet another foreign foe in the graveyard of empires. And for the US, the superpower, this was yet another foreign disaster. As cities and towns fell to the Taliban in rapid succession, Western troops and embassy staff scrambled to flee a country of which its government had lost control. August in Kabul is the story of how America's longest mission came to an abrupt and humiliating end, told through the eyes of Afghans whose lives have been turned upside down: a young woman who harbours dreams of a university education; a presidential staffer who works desperately to hold things together as the government collapses around him; a prisoner in the notorious Bagram Prison who suddenly finds himself free when prison guards abandon their post. Andrew Quilty was one of a handful of Western journalists who stayed in Kabul as the city fell. This is his first-hand account of those dramatic final days. 
   
  ‘A compelling, thought provoking must-read about the days leading up to the fall of Kabul and its aftermath from a photo-journalist who spent almost a decade living in Afghanistan, capturing both its sorrows and its joys.’ YALDA HAKIM

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  Nautch Boy - A Memoir of My Life...

  Manish Gaekwad, Asif Ali Beg

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  The Last Courtesan was his mother's story. Nautch Boy tells his own. 
   
  A sweet-faced, quiet boy dressed in matching pink shorts and a top poses demurely for a photograph in a kotha, holding a flower vase with plastic white daisies in it. Powdered, scented women around him sparkle and pirouette like movie stars on the silver screen. The boy looks at them in awe. Will he be able to join them in this evening of glamour and music? When will he become a nautch boy?  
  His dream is jinxed by his courtesan mother Rekhabai's ambition to secure his future away from every last thing that ties him to the kotha. But can he silence the music in his veins?  
  Sent off to a boarding school in the hills, the boy learns to balance the two worlds-he can undulate his hips to popular Hindi songs like his mother but also recite by heart the poems of Rossetti and Shelley.  
  Nautch Boy is Manish Gaekwad's account of being born and raised in a disrespected environment at odds with his privileged education. He finds his vocation as a reporter, screenwriter and a novelist, and eventually replaces that flower vase of fake white daisies with colourful stories of love, laughter and decay from the kothas.

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  Snatched: Trapped by a Woman to...

  Elizabeth Harper

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  Groomed and procured by a woman, raped by several men and labelled ‘one of the most abused girl in Rotherham’, now Elizabeth Harper is fighting for answers as to why so many people paid to protect our children simply turned a blind eye. 
  Aged just 15, lonely and bullied by her peers, Elizabeth ‘El’ Harper felt like an outcast. But then a chance encounter in the street with a friendly woman suddenly brought hope to her world. A friendship between El and this benevolent stranger blossomed, and life began to feel worth living again. 
  As the months passed, El grew more and more distant from her family. One day, she didn’t return home to her parents at all … 
  Snatched is the shocking true story of how a young girl was taken from the streets and groomed into Britain’s biggest sex-trafficking ring, all at the hands of a woman. 
  It is also an inspiring account of how trauma can turn vulnerability to strength in the most extraordinary of ways. 
  This is not just an autobiography, but a survival guide that explores the depths of human relationships and the resilience of the human spirit. Harper's account of her experiences with crime and sexual assault is both harrowing and inspiring, making it a top pick in the self-help genre. 
  For fans of Linda Watson-Brown (Don't Say A Word), Katy Weitz (The Girl for the Job), Maggie Hartley (Battered, Broken, Healed), and Sarah Wilson (First, We Make the Beast Beautiful). 
  HarperCollins 2022

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  This Box of Darkness

  Madeleine Arnold

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  I’m eighteen and faced with the most difficult decision of my life:Do I follow my crush to the missionary Bible school of my dreams?Do I go to college with my ex-boyfriend to see if we still have a future?Or do I stay home with my dad who's just been diagnosed with a brain tumor? 
  Pick one door. Close the others. Live with the fallout. 
  This Box of Darkness is a raw coming-of-age memoir about love, loss, and learning to trust God. Told through the eyes of Maddie, a pastor’s kid who’s been “saved” for as long as she can remember, it traces the final year of her father’s life: a Marine turned youth pastor and missionary who lived to glorify God, even as brain cancer stripped everything away. Poignant and deeply personal, this memoir explores what it means to wrestle with God when your carefully laid plans completely fall apart.

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  Still - A Memoir

  Julia Kelly

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  Julia Kelly's mother, Delphine, spent much of her life in the shadows as a politician's wife, tending selflessly to the needs of her husband, John, and five wild children. Rattling around in a draughty house, the siblings – though much-loved – are left largely to their own devices, tended to by a series of hapless au-pairs, dodging mouse invasions and forever in search of their exhausted mother's attention.
  When John collapses of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine, it is a sad liberation for his wife. Unshackled from her domestic duties, Delphine undergoes a transformation. She embraces sea-swimming and, along with a coterie of elderly ladies, sets out on adventures to far-flung places. Her final journey is to the Galapagos Islands where, hit by an unexpected wave, she loses her balance and is forced underwater. When her body surfaces she is no longer breathing. The book left on her bedside locker in the hotel is 1,000 Places to See Before You Die.
  Mired in grief, the five siblings begin the long repatriation of their mother's body. But it is the post-mortem report that provides the key to Julia's healing and recovery: gradually, within the clinical descriptions of limbs and eyes, heart and toes, Julia finds solace. Taking inspiration from each body part, she breathes life into Delphine – finally still and fully present for the first time in her seventy-two years – in gorgeous, luminous prose.
  What leaps from the pages of STILL is someone unforgettable: a vibrant, complex woman, whose endless capacity for love continues to inspire and comfort. In the end, She died as she had always strived to live: in the middle of a huge adventure, diving into the great unknown.
   

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  The View from My Foxhole - A...

  William Swanson

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  After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, millions of young American men were eager to join up and defend their country. William Swanson was among them. 
   
   
   
  The View from My Foxhole tells William Swanson's story of fighting in the jungles of Bougainville and Guam and the ash heap of Iwo Jima. Through it he maintains his sense of humor and thanks his lucky stars for every day he survives. 
   
   
   
  From The View from My Foxhole: 
   
   
   
  We move past the torn bodies of our buddies, hoping and praying that we will be spared, yet knowing in our hearts that many will not. Fear is on me again—fear of death, of course—but I have found that it is relatively easy to resign oneself to death and, on occasion, even welcome the thing. It is really the violence, the pain, the suddenness, and unpredictability of events that tear our insides. We cannot be sure of anything—not the next step or the next second—and that is the real terror.

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