Scribner
September 2013
On Sale: September 10, 2013
384 pages ISBN: 1451645600 EAN: 9781451645606 Kindle: B00A27XEMW Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
The dramatic and redemptive memoir of a woman whose curiosity led her to the worldβs most beautiful and remote places, its most imperiled and perilous countries, and then into fifteen months of harrowing captivityβan exquisitely written story of courage, resilience, and grace
As a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through issues of National Geographic and imagining herself in its exotic locales. At the age of nineteen, working as a cocktail waitress in Calgary, Alberta, she began saving her tips so she could travel the globe. 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. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a television reporter. And then, in August 2008, she traveled to Somaliaββthe most dangerous place on earth.β On her fourth day, she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road.
Held hostage for 460 days, Amanda converts to Islam as a survival tactic, receives βwife lessonsβ from one of her captors, and risks a daring escape. Moved between a series of abandoned houses in the desert, she survives on memoryβevery lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivityβand on strategy, fortitude, and hope. When she is most desperate, she visits a house in the sky, high above the woman kept in chains, in the dark, being tortured.
Vivid and suspenseful, as artfully written as the finest novel, A House in the Sky is the searingly intimate story of an intrepid young woman and her search for compassion in the face of unimaginable adversity.
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