Recommendations
Books Like I Am Malala
Best books to read after I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai's I Am Malala is the memoir of the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate — surviving a Taliban bullet for the right to go to school. These recommendations explore the memoir of courage and education tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the story of a young person who finds strength in books and learning against all opposition.
- 1Buy
Educated
by Tara Westover
The closest American parallel — Westover growing up in a survivalist Idaho family without formal schooling and by self-directed study earning a Cambridge PhD; shares I Am Malala's conviction that education is the thing worth fighting for even when the people around you cannot see its value.
- 2Buy
Becoming
by Michelle Obama
The most widely read female self-construction memoir — Michelle Robinson Obama from Chicago's South Side to Princeton, Harvard Law, and the White House; shares I Am Malala's interest in what a girl with intelligence and determination can become when given access to education.
- 3Buy
The Diary of a Young Girl
by Anne Frank
The predecessor memoir of a teenage girl in an impossible situation — Anne Frank in the Annex in Amsterdam, whose diary is the companion to I Am Malala in being the most widely read memoir of a young woman facing the worst that adults can do.
- 4Buy
A Long Way Gone
by Ishmael Beah
The Sierra Leone child soldier companion — Beah's memoir of being conscripted as a child soldier and his eventual rehabilitation and education; the companion for I Am Malala readers who want another extraordinary memoir of a child who survived something no child should face.
- 5Buy
The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
The Afghanistan companion in narrative — Amir and Hassan in Kabul before and after the Soviet invasion and Taliban rule; the fiction companion for I Am Malala readers that most directly addresses the same Taliban-controlled Afghanistan that shaped Malala's world.
- 6Buy
A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini
The companion Hosseini — two Afghan women across three decades of war and Taliban rule; the novel that most directly imagines what women's experience has been in the same Taliban-ruled Afghanistan that Malala fought against.
- 7Buy
Half the Sky
by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
The companion global feminist nonfiction — Kristof and WuDunn's account of women's oppression and resilience across Asia and Africa; the nonfiction companion for I Am Malala readers who want to understand the broader context of the struggle Malala represents.
- 8Buy
The Glass Castle
by Jeannette Walls
The American childhood-resilience companion — Walls escaping a nomadic, impoverished childhood to become a journalist; shares I Am Malala's portrait of a young woman who transcends the limitations of the family and community she was born into.
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