Long Walk Home

Product Description

This is the story of how over a period of one hundred & ninety-two days I was torn away from the life I knew & loved & dragged down to the depths of despair; of how I endured enforced isolation & near-starvation at the hands of Somali pirates; & of how I made a choice to survive by any & all means that I could muster. In September 2011 Judith Tebbutt & her husband David set out on an adventurous holiday to Kenya. A couple for thirty-three years they had first met in Zambia: Africa had played a major part in their life together. After a joyous week on safari in the Masai Mara they flew on to a beach resort forty kilometres south of Somalia. & there in the early hours of 11 September tragedy struck them. Judith was torn away from David by a band of armed pirates dragged over sea & land to a village in the arid heart of lawless Somalia & there held hostage in a squalid room a ransom on her head. There too she learned the terrible truth that the responsibility of securing her release now rested with her son Ollie. But though she was isolated intimidated & near-starved Judith resolved to survive
- walking endless circuits of her nine-foot prison trying to make her captors see her as a human being keeping her faith at all times in Ollie. Powerful moving & at times quite devastating this is Judith Tebbutt's story in her own words. It is a memoir of the life she shared with her beloved husband an unflinching account of the ordeal that overturned her world & a testament to the inner resilience & familial love that sustained her through captivity. There is nothing so bad in life as to have no hope
- to believe you have been defeated to give in to that. Now that I found myself in confinement four thousand miles from home under a hostile sky I would not accept that fate for myself.