I Choose to Live
Sabine Dardenne
Virago, pounds-12.99
THIS is a harrowing, compulsive little book. How could the personal account of a 12-year-old girl, abducted by a paedophile and kept hostage for 80 days, be otherwise?
Sabine Dardenne was plucked off her bicycle on her way to school one spring day in 1996, the latest victim of Belgium's notorious Marc Dutroux. She was kept prisoner in his house. Daily, she was taken upstairs to be abused; the rest of the time she spent alone, locked in a concealed, windowless cellar, 3ft x 9ft. Dutroux employed fiendish psychology, brainwashing Sabine to believe that a sinister Mr Big was after her as a result of something her father, an ex-policeman, had done, and that Dutroux was, in fact, her saviour. She wrote long, anguished letters to her mother; the paedophile kept them (they were later read out at his trial) but then informed his victim that her mother had replied to say "enjoy the sex". On this subject, Sabine is silent: her angry, dignified story deliberately avoids detail of the abuse; she published her book only, she says, to ensure that no paedophile is ever
freed for "good behaviour".
Sabine was rescued and Dutroux, who had murdered and raped four other women and little girls, got life imprisonment. But there is no happy ending: Sabine's family life, rocky already, was torn apart and Sabine has grown from a brave and bolshie girl - a stroppy little madam, as she described herself - into someone who sounds a hardened, cynical outcast. She leaves much unsaid. But her testimony, told in the raw, patchy, unsophisticated style of a child, enters the highest rank of tales of epic survival.
Swimming to Antarctica - Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer
Lynne Cox
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pounds-18.99
LYNNE Cox comes to life in an environment more alien than the moon's surface: she is the foremost long-distance ocean swimmer in the world.
The sea is, for landlubbers, a bizarre, hostile place, beyond all dreams, where we will never go. Anyone scared of deep, dark water will read with near terror her descriptions of battling for hours across currents and icy temperatures. Hers is the story of an extraordinary love affair with the oceans and of an almost mystical connection with them. She recognises different textures of water; she likens it to swimming across the face of a guitar, each string playing a different temperature; she describes with poetic intensity the encounters both with f lying fish and her own mortality.
Cox, an American, broke the men's and women's record for the English Channel as a teenager; she swam the Cook Strait between New Zealand's North and South Islands; she was the first to cross the Strait of Magellan; and the first to swim the Bering Strait from Alaska to Siberia in water temperatures that would have killed anyone else. This is a strange, beautiful book whose only fault is to reveal too little about Cox's life on land.
Learning to Breathe
Andy Cave
Hutchinson, pounds-18.99
HAD the miners' strike never taken place, and the industry survived, Andy Cave might still be down the pit weekdays and climbing local crags at weekends. Instead, he is one of Britain's foremost mountaineers, veteran of the first ascent of the north face of Changabang, and a university lecturer in socio-linguistics.
His warm and accessible autobiography is the story not just of alpine glory, but also a symbolic one of escape from working-class grime in Yorkshire to physical and intellectual freedom. It relates a remarkable journey from claustrophobia underground to release in the world's high, empty places.
It also carries echoes of Billy Elliot in its destruction of class and cultural barriers. A thoroughly New Labour tale, in fact, but don't let that put you off.
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