on 28 May 1996 twelve-year-old Sabine Dardenne was kidnapped by the man who turned out to be one of Belgium's most heinous pedophiles. She was his prisoner for eighty long days.

I need to write this book for three reasons: so that people stop giving me strange looks and treating me like a curiosity; so that no one asks me any more questions ever agai; and so that the judicial system never again frees a paedophile for good behaviour.

The Dutroux Affair' shook the world of Europe. In the middle of the immense machinery of investigation and justice there was Sabine Dardenne herself, Dutroux's last victim. She was held captive for eighty days, and, astonishingly, she survived. Far from sensationalising the horror, her story, dignified and restrained, is ultimately uplifting. Says Sabine Dardenne: I choose to live.