Stolen : escape from Syria

In the middle of one of the worst civil wars in Syria's history, Louise Monaghan crossed a heavily guarded border to save her six-year-old daughter from the father who had callously snatched her from her home in Cyprus.

Not knowing what lay ahead, the Irish mother tricked her ex-husband into believing she still loved him and wanted them to live together as a family, purely so that she could see her kidnapped child again. Once in his homeland, Louise too was held captive, locked inside a run-down house day and night with little food and no hope of being released.

Sick from polluted water, severely beaten by her ex-husband and abandoned by the Turkish men paid to rescue her, she took her little girl and made a daring escape. The journey they made through bomb attacks and sniper fire, and across a heavily patrolled mountain range in the dead of night, was a harrowing ordeal.

Yet miraculously they both survived, and Stolen is Louise's breathtaking account of events.