I Choose My Beginning

A Story of Courage and Activism

De: Nadia Murad

In a lyrical and profoundly moving memoir, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Nadia Murad reclaims her extraordinary journey from the embers of devastation to a fight for freedom—and for what comes next when a young girl’s flame cannot be extinguished.

In 2014, Nadia Murad was a young girl living in Northern Iraq when her world was shattered. Islamic State fighters attacked her village, massacring hundreds of people—including her mother and six of her brothers—and forced her, along with thousands of Yazidi women and girls, into the ISIS slave trade. Nadia daringly escaped after enduring the unimaginable, but she couldn’t walk away from those still in captivity. Her fight for their freedom won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018. Her life since then has been split in two: the hero—a survivor and global activist—and the woman learning how to be a friend, a student, a wife, who can finally experience ordinary joy.

In I Choose My Beginning, Nadia brings these two selves together, transforming her past into a new life of strength, perseverance, and joy as a woman accepted by the world, and herself. Throughout her work with world leaders and her time as a student attending classes on Zoom, from reshaping international law to intimate meals with new friends, building hospitals for displaced families, and marrying the love of her life, Nadia holds with her the memory of her loved ones—those who survived and those who did not—those who reminded her she was always more than a victim. An activist, a survivor, and a woman, Nadia’s story is both unique and compellingly universal.

Beautifully written and illuminating, I Choose My Beginning is the story of an extraordinary woman, a heroine passionately reclaiming her humanity.