It recounts the agonizing and dangerous months she spent as a hostage: being shuttled from camp to camp at gunpoint, sheltering under trees, enduring insects, sandstorms and crippling boredom, embarking on hunger strikes and, eventually, breaking free. Those events, and everything that happened in between, are chronicled in 'The Weight of Sand,' which was released in French earlier this year and is now being published in translation. Some 450 days later, the pair made world headlines after escaping their captors in Mali and flagging down a passing truck, with Blais carrying a jug of water and 57 poems that she'd written in captivity. She and Tacchetto, her sometimes boyfriend, were kidnapped in December 2018 by an armed Islamic terrorist group in eastern Burkina Faso as they drove towards the border with Benin. The fact that Blais survived to tell her story is improbable. 'I was their hostage: both a treasure and a nobody.' 'I had become docile, a puppet in their hands. 'I no longer had the strength to fight against oblivion,' she writes in a new book about her ordeal. Despite the imminent danger, all she felt was numbness. Separated from her travelling companion, Luca Tacchetto, and the group of women with whom she'd earlier been held hostage, the Quebec woman found herself in a truck racing across the Sahara in the company of yet another group of armed men. MONTREAL - Almost 250 days into her 15-month captivity in Mali, Edith Blais realized her life was no longer her own, and she didn't know if she'd ever get it back.

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