Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Books Like I Am Malala
I Am Malala is not primarily a book about being shot. It is a book about wanting something simple — the right to go to school, to read, to be taken seriously — and about what happens when that simple desire is treated as a threat. Malala Yousafzai was fifteen when a Taliban gunman boarded her school bus in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. She survived and wrote one of the most important memoirs of the past decade. The books on this list share the same territory: childhoods interrupted by political violence, girls who refused to be made small, and the cost of insisting on an education or a voice when the world around you says you should have neither. These five books ask the same question from different countries, different generations, and different forms.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Memoir · Literary Fiction · Updated June 2026
Educated
Tara Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a survivalist family that did not believe in formal education, hospitals, or the government. She had no birth certificate until she was nine. She did not set foot in a classroom until she was seventeen. By thirty she had a PhD from Cambridge. Educated is the memoir of what it took to get there — the family she had to leave, the version of herself she had to dismantle, and the education that was both the thing she fought for and the thing that made her unrecognisable to the people she loved. It spent over three years on the New York Times bestseller list.
Educated is the most direct companion to I Am Malala on this list. The settings could not be more different — rural Idaho is not Pakistan’s Swat Valley — but the underlying question is identical: what does it cost a girl to insist on being educated when everyone around her says she should not be? Westover’s answer is as costly as Malala’s, and in some ways more uncomfortable to read, because the people doing the denying are her own family.
Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi grew up in Tehran. She was ten when the Islamic Revolution of 1979 transformed the country around her. Persepolis is her graphic memoir of that childhood and adolescence — the revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the veil, the increasingly restrictive theocracy that shaped her generation, and her eventual exile to Vienna at fourteen. It is drawn in stark black and white and reads with the immediacy and moral clarity of a child who understands exactly what is being taken from her. It won numerous awards and is one of the most important graphic memoirs ever published.
Persepolis covers the same ground as I Am Malala in a different form and a different country: a girl’s childhood disrupted by political violence and religious authoritarianism, and the specific experience of being a girl in a society that has decided girls should be invisible. Satrapi’s graphic form does something Malala’s prose cannot — it makes the reader see as well as read, and that double act of witnessing is its own kind of argument.
The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank was thirteen when she went into hiding with her family in a concealed apartment in Amsterdam. She kept a diary for two years and three months, until the morning in August 1944 when the hiding place was discovered. She died in Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945, weeks before liberation. Her father Otto, the only member of the family to survive, retrieved the diary and arranged its publication in 1947. It has since been translated into more than seventy languages. It is the most widely read diary in the world and one of the most important documents of the twentieth century.
The connection to I Am Malala is not the violence — it is the voice. Anne Frank and Malala Yousafzai are both girls who refused to stop writing, refused to stop thinking, refused to be silent when silence was the safer option. Anne Frank could not survive what happened to her. Malala did. Read together, the two books form an argument about what girls are capable of when they are given — or take — the right to speak.
A Long Way Gone
Ishmael Beah was twelve years old when his village in Sierra Leone was attacked by rebels during the civil war of the 1990s. He was separated from his family and spent months as a wandering refugee before being recruited into the government army at thirteen. A Long Way Gone is his memoir of those years — the violence he witnessed, the violence he participated in, and the slow and painful process of rehabilitation with the help of UNICEF. It was an immediate international bestseller and remains one of the most important accounts of what political conflict does to children.
A Long Way Gone is the most harrowing book on this list and the one that most directly extends what Malala writes about: the weaponisation of children, and what it takes for a child to survive a world that has decided they are expendable. Where Malala is denied the right to learn, Ishmael is forced to become a soldier. Both books insist on the full humanity of children caught in conflicts they did not make.
The Kite Runner
Two boys grow up together in Kabul in the 1970s — Amir, the son of a wealthy Pashtun merchant, and Hassan, the son of his father’s servant. Their friendship, and the act of betrayal that ends it, becomes the axis around which Amir’s life turns for the next twenty years: through the Soviet invasion, the fall of the mujahideen, the rise of the Taliban, and his eventual emigration to the United States. The Kite Runner was Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel, published in 2003, and became one of the most widely read novels of the decade.
The Kite Runner is the only fiction on this list and the only book set in Afghanistan rather than Pakistan — but the political and cultural landscape it depicts is the same one that produced the conditions Malala writes about. The Taliban that destroyed Amir’s Kabul is the same Taliban that shot Malala on her school bus. Reading Hosseini alongside Malala gives the political history a human face; reading Malala alongside Hosseini shows what that history looks like from inside it.
Not sure where to start?
If you want the book that is most directly like I Am Malala
→ Read Educated by Tara Westover. Same question, different continent. A young woman who fought her way toward an education that her family tried to deny her — and who had to leave everything she knew to get it.
If you want something shorter that covers the same ground in a different form
→ Read Persepolis. Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir is two hours of reading and stays with you for years. A girl growing up under the Islamic Revolution in Iran — the same political forces, the same insistence on female invisibility, the same refusal to comply.
If you want to understand the political world that produced the Taliban Malala writes about
→ Read The Kite Runner. Hosseini’s Afghanistan — the Soviet invasion, the mujahideen, the Taliban — is the same region and the same history. Fiction, but historically grounded and emotionally more powerful than most nonfiction on the subject.
If you want to continue reading Malala herself
→ Her 2025 memoir Finding My Way picks up where I Am Malala left off — Oxford, the Nobel Prize, PTSD, falling in love. See all 6 books by Malala →
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“One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.” — Malala Yousafzai
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