Moved between a series of abandoned houses in the desert, she survives on memory-every lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivity-and on strategy, fortitude, and hope. Held hostage for 460 days, Amanda converts to Islam as a survival tactic, receives “wife lessons” from one of her captors, and risks a daring escape. And then, in August 2008, she traveled to Somalia-“the most dangerous place on earth.” On her fourth day, she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a television reporter. Aspiring to understand the world and live a significant life, she backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, and emboldened by each adventure, went on to Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. At the age of nineteen, working as a cocktail waitress in Calgary, Alberta, she began saving her tips so she could travel the globe. The dramatic and redemptive memoir of a woman whose curiosity led her to the world’s most beautiful and remote places, its most imperiled and perilous countries, and then into fifteen months of harrowing captivity-an exquisitely written story of courage, resilience, and grace.Īs a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through issues of National Geographic and imagining herself in its exotic locales.

View my house from the sky