Stolen: Escape from Syria
Part thriller adventure, part tender ­mother-child drama, this memoir dramatizes today’s Middle East conflict through the author’s personal experience of capture and rescue. Divorced from Mostafa Assad, her abusive Syrian husband, Irish-born Catholic Monaghan focuses her life on their lovely six-year-old daughter, May. Then, after Assad kidnaps May from their home in Cyprus, Monaghan travels to war-torn Syria, pretends that she wants to make a go of their marriage, and suffers brutal abuse as his prisoner while she tries to plan an escape with her child. Always on her cell phone, she is in close contact with her loyal sister in Dublin and with the Irish consulate in Damascus, but many officials look the other way. Some smugglers help, but others take her money and abandon her. Eventually, though, with support from many sides, Christian and Muslim, she does finally make it across the border with her child. Set against the horrors of civil war, the domestic conflict brings home the personal suffering and the courage behind the news images. --Hazel Rochman