
Kidnapped for 460 days in Somalia, Amanda Lindhout's NYT bestseller reveals how she survived brutal captivity by creating a mental "house in the sky." Oprah Magazine called it "searingly unsentimental" - a memoir so transformative it "changes your most fundamental view of the world."
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A nine-year-old girl spreads twenty-five-cent National Geographic magazines across her bedroom table in a basement apartment, arranging them "like I'd seen in fancy homes." Outside, her stepfather punches holes in walls. At school, classmates call her dirty. But in those glossy pages, she gallops across Hungarian plains, churns yak butter on Chinese plateaus, sips coffee in Parisian cafes. The world beyond Sylvan Lake, Alberta becomes more real than the violence surrounding her. What happens when that childhood escape route becomes an adult obsession? When wanderlust transforms from salvation into something far more dangerous? This is the story of how one woman's dreams carried her from poverty to the world's most beautiful places-and then into 460 days of unimaginable darkness.