Jacinda Ardern's kind of governance

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's memoir begins in an unusual place: Her friend's bathroom, where she is waiting for a big reveal with bated breath. A pregnancy test lies on the sink. It's several days after election night in 2017, a time of high political drama and tense negotiations to win a majority. Ms Ardern writes: "I was days away from learning if I would run a country, and now, I was seconds away from learning if I would do it while having a baby."

- Neha Bhatt

The book then cuts to New Zealand's famed countryside, as her family car makes its way through the dense forest to a town called Murupara, where Ms Ardern's father served as a police officer and she attended school.

Decades later, when asked by a journalist where she "first became political," she replied, "because I lived in Murupara," where she witnessed poverty, inequality, and "the way circumstances can push a community into difficulty." This early exposure to poverty, along with dozens of other experiences she recounts in her book, reveals what fueled her commitment to social justice and helped shape the leader she chose to become.

A Different Kind of Power is a political memoir powered by a terrific selection of stories woven together in an absorbing narrative. The book does two things particularly well. It presents a sensitively-told, vividly-imagined personal story framed against a pivotal political era in New Zealand. It also lays down, without being preachy or overt, a compelling blueprint for empathetic leadership and is a call to bring more kindness into politics, channeling Ms Ardern's trademark style, while both in power and in opposition.