Nadia Amin is a thirtysomething academic who is estranged from her mother and recovering from a painful breakup with her ex. When she is offered a job heading up a UN programme aimed at rehabilitating Islamic State brides, she jumps at the chance for change. Having published a paper on deradicalisation, Nadia feels she is more than qualified for the job. But when she arrives in Iraq, she realises she will need to overcome prejudice \u2013 her own and that of her co-workers \u2013 if she is to make any progress.<\/p>\n
Shortlisted for this year\u2019s Women\u2019s prize for fiction, Fundamentally is the smart and acerbic debut novel from Nussaibah Younis featuring a hilarious heroine who, noting the absence of burned-out cars and bullet holes at her destination, notes: \u201cIt\u2019s not like I was expecting Stalingrad but Baghdad took the piss \u2026 Why was it so \u2026 nice?\u201d Yet it also offers more serious commentary on the creaking bureaucracy of humanitarian missions that are meant to be about solving problems rather than creating them.<\/p>\n
Told in the first person, the book is read by Sarah Slimani whose pacing is on point. Her Nadia pinballs between brash, unfiltered confidence and crushing self-doubt. When she meets Sara, who left London to join IS at 15 and has been disowned by her parents, the two form an unsteady bond. Each must put aside their preconceptions about the other \u2013 Nadia initially sees Sara as an ungrateful refugee while Sara tells Nadia she is a \u201cslag with a saviour complex\u201d \u2013 though they soon discover they have more in common than they thought.<\/p>\n
Available via Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 9hr 41min<\/p>\n
Further listening<\/p>\n
The House of Doors<\/strong> skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/p>\n The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Molly<\/strong>
Tan Twan Eng, WF Howes, 11hr 15min
This reimagining of the writer W Somerset Maugham\u2019s time in Malaysia is read by David Oakes and Louise Mai-Newberry<\/p>\n
Blake Butler, Audible Studios, 10hr 22min
Butler narrates his raw and exposing memoir about the suicide of his wife and what he learned about her after her death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nadia Amin is a thirtysomething academic who is estranged from her mother and recovering from a painful breakup…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":88821,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-88820","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114908646916122603","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88820\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}