@EineReiseDurchDieZeit I bought this for my BIL a couple of years ago, would it suit your friend? It is about dealing with grief though so maybe a bit too on the nose right now
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/442533/all-the-beauty-in-the-world-by-bringley-patrick/9781529924596
What I often do is browse through the end of year "best of" non-fiction lists in the papers - there are some great picks there depending on what the person's interests are (art, sport, politics etc)
61 Fundamentally, Nussaibah Younis (RWYO)
This has had hugely mixed reviews here and I think I agree with both camps! (slightly spoiler-ish below as I think most people here have read this).
I like the irreverent, satirical storytelling and the choice to approach the subject matter without a po face. I thought it was a valuable choice to humanise the ISIS brides without minimising the horrors of what was done by members of the organisation. Younis did a decent job of showing different perspectives: just when you thought she was being too lenient or lightweight, she would switch the angle and give a reminder that these situations are full of horrible complexity, and that (beyond "people should not kill each other, and especially should not kill each other in deliberately awful ways") it can be surprisingly difficult to sort people and actions into right and wrong.
In that vein, Sara was not an innocent party, nor always likeable. She had acted with some agency (and I liked the moment where Nadia, having rescued Sara from the camp, realises that she doesn't really know what the girl's views are) but it's clear that she has also been the victim of grooming and exploitation. Her voice, though, is less than convincing, and wavers annoyingly like an actor doing a bad accent.
I didn't mind the silliness of the UN chapters, with the stereotype characters and the farce, although there were times where it sat very uneasily with some of the subject matter. My main problem was Nadia, who is a mess of a main character. We're told that she's super clever (Oxford, then a PhD which gets huge attention for its ideas on de-radicalising ISIS women) but she behaves like a moron, bringing zero expertise to her job and generally making things worse through her bungling. She's not merely ignorant or unprofessional, she's positively toxic and I couldn't get into her corner, however hard I tried.
I think someone here (sorry I can't remember who) summed this up, like Yesteryear, as being a book where the author had a great idea but failed to create a great book out of it.
I have Guest House for Young Widows on my wishlist and think I will bump that up as it's supposed to be very good.
62 Stargazing: Memoirs of a Young Lighthouse Keeper, Peter Hill (RWYO)
And now for something completely different. This is a lovely and very readable memoir of a summer in the early 70s spent working on lighthouses off the west Scottish coast.
Part of the charm is that it's a glimpse of another world that feels far removed from this one - jobs are plentiful (there was full employment, he writes; students could disappear to hitch to Amsterdam or to Goa, come back months later and walk into a job), student Life is cheap and easy, and lighthouses are run by three men (always men) working two 4-hour shifts every 24 hours to keep the lamp lit. He explains how the work is divvied up, how the men cook, eat and sleep, how they occupy their time and keep sane during long weeks of isolation. The men are of different generations: some with experience of fighting in WW2, others younger and more affected by Vietnam or the Watergate hearings, which they follow on the TV from the US. Hill, at the time described in this book, was an art student, and he has an artist's eye for describing the views and rugged landscapes so that they come alive in your mind's eye.
This IS a bit of a laddish book (Hill inhabits his 19-year-old self vividly); there's a lot of men whanging on about prog rock and boring manly hobbies, and the pass criteria of the Bechdel test are so far away that you would need military-issue binoculars to spot them. If you can make allowance for that, it's a lovely little snapshot of a vanished occupation and a bygone age - a reminder that the 70s really are quite a long time ago now.