num_pages: 373
description: The dramatic and redemptive memoir of a woman whose curiosity led her to the worlds most beautiful and remote places its most imperiled and perilous countries and then into fifteen months of harrowing captivityan 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 Somaliathe most dangerous place on earth. 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 wife lessons from one of her captors and risks a daring escape. Moved between a series of abandoned houses in the desert she survives on memoryevery lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivityand 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.
language: English
title: A House in the Sky
publisher: Scribner