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In brief: Carrie Soto Is Back; High; All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days – reviews

<span>Photograph: Mikhail Vorobiev/Alamy</span>
Photograph: Mikhail Vorobiev/Alamy

Carrie Soto Is Back

Taylor Jenkins Reid
Hutchinson Heinemann, £16.99, pp368

Carrie Soto is a retired tennis champion whose grand slam record is about to be broken. With her father as coach, She comes out of retirement to defend her status as the world’s greatest tennis player. Emotionally damaged by the death of her mother when she was a child, Carrie struggles to form personal relationships and this entertaining and enjoyable novel follows Carrie’s professional and personal journey towards self-fulfilment.

High: A Journey Across the Himalayas Through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal and China

Erika Fatland (translated by Kari Dickson)
MacLehose Press, £30, pp624

Fatland, a Norwegian anthropologist, is the award-winning author of travelogues Sovietistan and The Border. In High, she documents her travels through the 2,000km stretch of the Himalayas. Focusing on the villages she passes through and the lives of their inhabitants against a broader socio-cultural, historical and political backdrop, Fatland is a sensitive and insightful chronicler of quotidian lives and a compelling narrator of her extraordinary journey.

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler

Rebecca Donner
Canongate, £10.99, pp576 (paperback)

Donner’s American great-great-aunt, Mildred Harnack, moved to Germany in the late 1920s. Appalled by the rise of nazism, Mildred and her German husband embarked on a decade-long resistance campaign until their arrest and execution in 1943. With documentary evidence thin on the ground – Harnack destroyed her diaries – Donner questions what motivates someone to risk their life for the sake of their beliefs in a gripping story that reads like a political thriller.