Desert Flower

An “outstandingly dramatic and moving” memoir of fleeing a brutal girlhood in Somalia—and becoming a supermodel and UN special ambassador ( Kirkus Reviews ). To escape an arranged marriage to a sixty-year-old man, Waris Dirie ran away from her oppressive life in the African desert when she was barely in her teens, illiterate and impoverished, with nothing to her name but a tattered shawl. She traveled alone across the dangerous Somali desert to Mogadishu—the first leg of a remarkable journey tha