A Beginner's Guide to Acting English - Shappi Khorsandi

A deceptively light-hearted memoir describing the comedian's early childhood in Iran, her family's arrival in London, and their eventual need to remain in the UK as refugees after her father's satirical journalism attracts the wrong kind of attention from the new Iranian regime. Most memorable for me were the accounts of phoning back to relatives in Iran and hearing her child-aunt - only a year and a half older than her - shower her with ultra-formal compliments ("What a beautiful voice you have! May I die for your voice!") and sing the praises of the Ayatollah, and also a disturbingly amusing tale about her brother traumatising a small refugee boy from the flat downstairs by appearing at the window wearing an Ayatollah Khomeini mask, which somehow brought the refugee experience to life more clearly than more brutal descriptions would have done. The book's ending - the family attain refugee status, and an epilogue provides a happy update from more recent times - is only partially satisfying, perhaps because of the real-life difficulty of cancelling out the deep feelings of fear and vulnerability powerfully described in the wake of an attempt on her father's life: ("I knew it was impossible for us to just huddle together, us four, in the house and never go anywhere, but that is what I wanted to do. It was the only way I would feel safe, but there is no way to say it without sounding mad.")