The Runaways by Fatima Bhutto

I heard Fatima Bhutto speaking at the Sydney Writers Festival this year, about both the problems that beset Pakistan and specifically about this book. She attempts to open people’s eyes to the phenomenon of young people leaving their homes to fight with militant Islamist groups through the medium of fiction. The book deals with three young people who leave their homes running from problematic lives, where they feel they have no place. You get both the back story and the story of their journey, in all its horrifying detail as they become ever more deeply embroiled in their situation. I didn’t enjoy this book particularly. I found it a very depressing read, not surprising when the real life situation is exactly that.

No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani

This is a very hard book to read. It’s hard because of the story it tells, the flight of this brilliant Kurdish journalist, thinker and poet from persecution in his homeland and his incarceration by Australian authorities on Manus Island. Where he still is. It’s hard because he wrote his story as texts on his phone and sent it out via WhatApp. So what he talks about is the unremitting banality and boredom of daily life, interspersed with the horror of the third world conditions of mundane things like food queues and toilet filth, and then the flashes of hideous violence, torture and death of the inmates. Yet the language is beautiful, just beautiful. He escapes, in a sense, into philosophical musings. And there is something about Farsi that translates as poetry, probably the structure of the original language itself, which the translator has allowed to retain itself. This is a book that makes you angry, that you don’t want to read because it is true and it is wrong, but that you must read.