Books are the house of enthralling knowledge, they enhance our minds with wisdom and liberty. Books are the epitome of freedom. They serve as those faithful papers which help us in times of need, pain, and priority. Books never fail to amaze us with their contents, we draw friendship, action, emotion, fiction, non-fiction, and magic from them. The main motif of magic is to take a chunk from reality and supposedly it makes possible what’s impossible.
Let us go through the books which are emblematic of freedom.
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr ****
Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. She is twelve when the Nazis occupy Paris, and her father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. They carry the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel with them. Werner Pfennig, an orphan grows up with his younger sister in a mining town in Germany. He is enchanted by a crude radio. They find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways against all odds where people try to be good to one another. Anthony Doerr is the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning, and stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.
Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, Daisy Rockwell (Translator) ****
An eighty-year-old woman slips into a deep depression after the death of her husband. She resurfaces to gain a new lease on life. Her determination to fly in the face of the convention includes, striking up a friendship with a trans woman, and confusing her bohemian daughter who used to think, of herself as more ‘modern’ than the two. The older woman insisted that they can travel back to Pakistan as well as simultaneously confront the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition, and re-evaluate being a mother, a daughter, a woman, and a feminist. The writer poses a playful tone and exuberant wordplay results in a book that is engaging, funny, and utterly original rather than responding to tragedy with seriousness, and at the same time as being an urgent and timely protest against the destructive impact of borders and boundaries, whether between religions, countries or genders.
Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction by Arundhati Roy ****
The best-selling author of My Seditious Heart and the Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a new and pressing dispatch from the heart of the crowd and the solitude of the writer’s desk. The chant of “Azadi” which is the Urdu for “Freedom”, is the slogan of the freedom struggle in Kashmir against what Kashmiris see as the Indian Occupation. Ironically, it also became the chant of millions on the streets of India against the project of Hindu Nationalism. Arundhati Roy began to ask between these two calls for Freedom, a chasm or a bridge. The streets fell silent, all over the world not only in India. The coronavirus brought with it another, more terrible understanding of Azadi, making nonsense of international borders, incarcerating whole populations, and bringing the modern world to a halt like nothing else ever could. Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism in this series of electrifying essays. These essays include meditations on language, public as well as private, and the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times. She says the pandemic is a portal between one world and another. All the illness and devastation it has left a wake it is an invitation to the human race, an opportunity, to imagine another world.
Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela ****
Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. He describes the struggle to reconcile his political activity with his devotion to his family, the anguished breakup of his first marriage, and the painful separations from his children. He brings vividly to life the escalating political warfare in the fifties between the ANC and the government, culminating in his dramatic escapades as an underground leader and the notorious Rivonia Trial of 1964, in which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He recounts the surprisingly eventful twenty-seven years in prison and the complex, delicate negotiations that led both to his freedom and the beginning of the end of apartheid. Finally, he provides the ultimate inside account.
The Last Train to London by Meg Waite Clayton ****
The New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Exiles conjures her best novel. A pre-World War II era story with the emotional resonance of Orphan Train and All the Light We Cannot See, centering on the Kindertransports that carried thousands of children out of Nazi-occupied Europe and one brave woman who helped them escape to safety. There is hope in the darkness, though. Truus Wijsmuller, a member of the Dutch resistance, risks her life smuggling Jewish children out of Nazi Germany to the nations that will take them. It is a mission that becomes even more dangerous after the Anschluss Hitler’s annexation of Austria as, across Europe, countries close their borders to the growing number of refugees desperate to escape.
