When she is finally free, motherhood becomes crucial to Malika’s ability to fully live her life: she adopts first her niece, then a baby boy, Adam, from Morocco. In La Prisonniere (US title: Stolen Lives), Malika mourned the children she was not having as her body wasted away in prison.

Living for the first time as an adult, Malika writes candidly about adjusting to the world we take for granted, from negotiating ATMs to the excesses of shopping malls, the silliness of grand cuisine, to falling in love and sex. The world seen from the eyes of someone who has been locked up for 20 years, it challenges our views about things that we took for granted in our everyday life. However, I can assure you Malika’s memoir is honest and full of insights. If you read about a personality you really like or idolise, it doesn’t matter if the writing is bad, that’s why bad memoirs of famous personalities sell. I think that’s a common problem with biography and memoir. I thought it is extremely difficult to be impartial about what I think about the book when I am deeply affected by Malika Oufkir’s plight. It is my desert island book and there were many questions I posed which I hope this sequel would gave me the answers. Why I read it: I was in awe of Malika Oufkir’s life in desert goal when I read her first book La Prisonniere : 20 years in a desert gaol. After a remarkable escape, Malika and her family returned to the world they’d left behind, only to find it transformed.

Her father was executed for attempting to assassinate the king, and she and her family were locked away for two decades, the youngest brother was only 3 then. But in 1972, her life of luxury came to a crashing halt. Malika Oufkir was born into extreme privilege as the daughter of the king of Morocco’s closest aide, and she grew up in the palace as companion to the Moroccan princess. In her highly anticipated follow-up, Malika reflects on the life she lived before and during incarceration and how dramatically the world had changed when she emerged.

La Prisonniere (US title: Stolen Lives), Malika Oufkir’s intensely moving account of her twenty years imprisoned in a desert jail in Morocco, was a surprise international best seller and the second non-fiction title ever selected for Oprah’s Book Club. In writing Stolen Lives, the success of which I could not, of course, have foreseen, I exorcised the past, at least in part, but I also took up another burden: the role of victim. Telling my family’s story, which was linked to those of other political prisoners whose fates were now slowly being revealed, might help me move forward with my life.

Stolen Lives by Malika Oufkir