Butterfly

When the engine of an overcrowded dinghy carrying refugees from the Turkish coast toward Greece cut out in 2015, Yusra Mardini, her sister and two others went into the sea and pushed the sinking boat for three and a half hours until it reached Lesbos, saving those aboard. Mardini's memoir traces a route that began in a war-torn suburb of Damascus, crossed Europe to Berlin and led to the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016, where she swam for the Refugee Olympic Team. She also describes her later role as a UN Goodwill Ambassador. Her stated hope is that readers will see refugees as ordinary people driven from home by war.

It was a pick for Emma Watson's book club, Our Shared Shelf.