Stolen Lives, Malika Oufkir's intensely moving account of her twenty year imprisonment in a desert jail in Morocco,

was a surprise international bestseller and translated into twenty-six languages. In Freedom, her eagerly anticipated follow-up - already an instant bestseller in France - Malika reflects on her life before her cruel incarceration and the dramatic change in the world she discovered when she emerged.

Malika's childhood was a storybook fantasy - reared in the palace alongside the king's daughter, she enjoyed unfathomable luxury and privilege. This came at the sole discretion of the monarch, whose power was absolute and whose word was law. In 1972, the nightmare began: her father was summarily executed for attempting to assassinate the despot, and she was locked away with her mother and siblings, who ranged in age from nineteen to three years old.

After a harrowing escape, Malika and her family returned to reclaim their lost lives, only to find the world almost unrecognizable. Following more years of house arrest, surveillance, and harassment, Malika joined several of her siblings in Paris, to make a new start with her beloved husband Eric. She writes candidly, with humor and accuracy, about the world we take for granted - the excesses of shopping malls and the gluttony of our food-fetishizing culture; the machinations of everyday bureaucracy; the flavor-of-the-month aspects of celebrity, including her own. Initially, every action was fraught for her; from navigating an ATM to asking directions of a policeman, from ordering in a restaurant to falling in love.      But she comes to appreciate her own strengths. Her innate intelligence and her long-term deprivation have given her a rare perspective on both her native country and the West, a hard-won wisdom and a keen sense of the ridiculous.

MALIKA OUFKIR, born in 1953 divides her time between Miame and Marrakesh with her  husband and children.  Her first book, Stolen Lives, was published in 2001 and was an international bestseller.

LINDA COVERDALE is the translator of over forty books. She has won the French-American Foundation Prize, the International IMPAC Literary Award, and is a chevalier in the French Order of Arts and Letters.

EDITA BRYCHTA has appeared in the movies One Night Stand, Conspiracy Theory, Crime of the Century, and in the television movies Rockford Files: Godfather Knows Best, Behind the Palace Doors, and Blind Justice. She read Stolen Lives for Hyperion Audiobooks.