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 Somalia—“the 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 memory—every lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivity—and 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.
373 pages (September 2013)
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Book Trailer (Jessie Kain):
Amanda Lindhout interview (Citytv):
Title Read-alikes: In the Presence of My Enemies by Gracia Burnham; A Rope and a Prayer by David Rohde; Hostage by Paul Chandler; The Shattered Lens by Jonathan Alpeyrie; The ISIS Hostage by Puk Damsgard; Beneath the Tamarind Tree by Isha Sesay; Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden; The Girl Who Escaped ISIS by Farida Khalaf; The Translator by Daroud Hari; Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink; Under an Afghan Sky by Melissa Funk; The Pearl That Broke Its Shell by Nadia Hashimi; From the Ashes by Jesse Thistle; One Day Closer by Lorinda Stewart; and The Price of Life by Nigel Brennan.
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