A Long Walk Home, by Judith Tebbutt, review In her career as a social worker in psychiatric units, during which she was once attacked by a patient with a pair of scissors, she spent plenty of time retrieving souls lost in darkness. Hence, when her own was being dragged the same way, she drew on the principles she applied in working with her patients. There is nothing as bad in life as to have no hope, to believe you have been defeated, and to give into that. That Tebbutt has been able to put this book together is testimony to her ability to take her own advice. Written with help from a ghostwriter at Faber and Faber, the publisher where David Tebbutt worked as the finance director, it is a detailed, touching account, revealing not just how she coped, but also her tenderness for her husband, whose meticulous holiday planning habits were a standing joke in the Tebbutt household. His parting words to Ollie before going to Kenya were: "If anything should happen, our will is in the safe." A sense of foreboding stalks the couple from the outset of their holiday, when they arrive at the beach resort to find it eerily empty and themselves the only guests at dinner. The botched abduction then takes place the very first night, the gang spiriting Tebbutt by boat north to Somalia, under a moon that casts "a ribbon of silver across the sea's surface - an image of romance, turned here into horror." Vivid accounts then follow of life in captivity in a succession of compounds and insect-ridden houses. Just as I did when I was kidnapped by "Skullface" and "The Old Bastard" while reporting for the Telegraph in Somalia in 2008, she nicknames her captors according to their appearance and habits - "Vain Man," "Hungry Man," "Scary Man," "Chainsmoker" and so on. And she, too, finds comfort in listening to the BBC World Service, and some cheer is brought by the news that a raid by US special forces in Somalia has rescued two kidnapped aid workers and killed their captors. Her own kidnappers, fearing the same fate, move her from relatively comfortable quarters into the "Horrible House," a baking hot room seething with cockroaches and caterpillars. Throughout her ordeal, she keeps both body and mind together by walking circuits of the rooms in which she is held - hence the book's title. Freed in March 2012 - reportedly for a £820,000 ransom - she tries to move on from David almost as soon as she touches back down in Britain. While being debriefed at a country mansion provided by the Foreign Office, she stares out over the oak trees one morning, vowing to herself that "my life begins again from here." However, while her story may be inspirational, its ending is far from happy. David's murder, she says, is not something she will "get over." To this day in the family home in Bishop's Stortford, she still finds herself half-expecting him to wander through the door. And cooking, which she never much enjoyed anyway, is even more depressing when it is just for one. Told in simple, first-person prose, the book touches only briefly on the wider picture of why Somalia became a pirate haven in the first place, concentrating rightly on Tebbutt's raw personal experience instead. It is perhaps a shame we do not hear more about the clearly remarkable role of her son Ollie but, as she points out, professional negotiators, like the high-stakes poker players they are, never reveal their secrets. She does, however, pay touching tribute to her son, saying that she overcame her instinctive reluctance to write the book in the hope that it might one day be read by any children he might have. She wants them to learn first what a fine grandfather they would have had, and secondly "what a mentally strong and resolute man is their father." If future Tebbutts ever do read grandma's memoirs, they will think she was made of pretty strong stuff, too. Colin Freeman's account of his own abduction, Kidnapped: Life as a Somali Pirate Hostage, is published by Monday Books A Long Walk Home by Judith Tebbutt 344pp, Faber, t £14.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (rrp £16.99)