Family conflicts are hard to bear, especially when someone is faced with a choice between her beliefs and her parents. At the beginning of her new book, Ayaan Hirsi Ali visits her estranged father in a London hospital, where he is dying of leukaemia. He is unable to speak but clearly pleased to see her, smiling so much that ‘the warmth of his gaze’ radiates through the room. Their old arguments – about the arranged marriage she fled, and about Islam – are put to one side and the meeting provides some solace when he dies a week later.

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