Nadia Amin is a thirtysomething academic who is estranged from her mother and recovering from a painful breakup with her ex. When she is offered a job heading up a UN programme aimed at rehabilitating Islamic State brides, she jumps at the chance for change. Having published a paper on deradicalisation, Nadia feels she is more than qualified for the job. But when she arrives in Iraq, she realises she will need to overcome prejudice – her own and that of her co-workers – if she is to make any progress.

Shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction, Fundamentally is the smart and acerbic debut novel from Nussaibah Younis featuring a hilarious heroine who, noting the absence of burned-out cars and bullet holes at her destination, notes: “It’s not like I was expecting Stalingrad but Baghdad took the piss … Why was it so … nice?” Yet it also offers more serious commentary on the creaking bureaucracy of humanitarian missions that are meant to be about solving problems rather than creating them.

Told in the first person, the book is read by Sarah Slimani whose pacing is on point. Her Nadia pinballs between brash, unfiltered confidence and crushing self-doubt. When she meets Sara, who left London to join IS at 15 and has been disowned by her parents, the two form an unsteady bond. Each must put aside their preconceptions about the other – Nadia initially sees Sara as an ungrateful refugee while Sara tells Nadia she is a “slag with a saviour complex” – though they soon discover they have more in common than they thought.

• Available via Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 9hr 41min

Further listening

The House of Doors
Tan Twan Eng, WF Howes, 11hr 15min
This reimagining of the writer W Somerset Maugham’s time in Malaysia is read by David Oakes and Louise Mai-Newberry

Molly
Blake Butler, Audible Studios, 10hr 22min
Butler narrates his raw and exposing memoir about the suicide of his wife and what he learned about her after her death.