Gallego, who was born in Moscow in 1968 with severe cerebral palsy, was abandoned at the age of 1 by his father to the official discipline and extreme neglect of a Russian state orphanage. “I’m a hero. It’s easy to be a hero. If you don’t have hands or feet, you’re either a hero or dead . . . I’m a hero. I have no other choice.” It’s tough being a hero. Whether you have legs or not, you have to stand up for yourself. Gallego learnt early on to be self-affirming rather than self-pitying. His darkly, matter-of-factly Homeric, heroic shout of triumph is astonishing.

THE YEAR OF THE JOUNCER
by Simon Gray
Granta, £14.99

The jouncer in Simon Gray’s life is himself as a baby, able to rock his unattended pram and move it juddering and jouncing slowly along the path on a course towards, well, the life to come, perhaps, 68 years of it so far, during which “I haven’t done anything illegal, to my knowledge, nor immoral — at least not for years.” The year 2004 was better than some in Gray’s life — two of his plays were staged and his confessional The Smoking Diaries was published — so his jouncing in these journal entries is a little jauntier than of late.

THE PLACE AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
by Janine di Giovanni
Bloomsbury, £8.99

A meeting 25 years ago with Felicia Langer, an Israeli lawyer working in civil rights, jolted the twentysomething di Giovanni out of her comfortable middle-class life and into the dangerous places of the world as a war reporter. From the start, she took Langer’s advice as her guiding principle: “Write about the small voices, the people who can’t write about themselves.” In seven years of reporting, from 1998 to 2005, covering the Middle East, Bosnia, Africa and Russia, at some personal cost, di Giovanni, a Times contributor, has powerfully voiced the raw detail of brutal conflict on behalf of those who have suffered.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy