My Life as a Traitor, by Zarah Ghahramani
Bloomsbury, £12.99

If you are a 19-year-old student and bundled without warning or explanation into a police car on the streets of Tehran, banged up in a filthy cell in the notorious Evin prison, interrogated and beaten for 30 days then dumped penniless outside the city, you might - like Ghahramani - start to question not only the repressive brutality of the state, but also your own behaviour, beliefs and being as a young, impressionable political protester. The frame story here is Ghahramani's innocent (and, frankly, naive) life in a middle-class Iranian family, interwoven with her painful experiences of prison.

Dead Letters: The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides, by Gary Lachman
Dedalus, £9.99

Arts Council funding for the independent literary publisher Dedalus has been withdrawn - a shame, as it is committed to books of quality that will not easily find a publisher elsewhere. Dead Letters is an original and lively analysis of an aspect of literary life (and death) that too often is sensationalised elsewhere, without proper context. The A-list of suicides includes Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Arthur Koestler, Yukio Mishima and others, creatively categorised as existential, romantic, surreal, political and manic-depressive.

Read Gary Lachman's ten extraordinary literary suicides

We Will Not Fight: The Untold Story of World War One's Conscientious Objectors, by Will Ellsworth-Jones
Aurum, £18.99

Conscientious objection to taking life, particularly in war, has been an ethical dilemma since the beginning of the 20th century. To personalise his theme, Will Ellsworth-Jones takes the four brothers Brocklesby, of whom one, Bert, not only refused to fight, but to aid the war in any way. The courage of such men is an important thread in the development of our regard for freedom of conscience and the legitimacy of modern wars.

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