On 17 April 1986 a British television journalist was kidnapped in Beirut. His name was John McCarthy and he was to remain a hostage for the next five years. During those years he was cut off from everything and everybody he knew and loved, from family, friends, and, perhaps above all, from Jill Morrell, the girl he was going to marry. For five years, John McCarthy had to endure the deprivation – both physical and psychological – of captivity; the filth and the squalor of the cells in which he was kept; the agony of isolation and repeated self-examination; the pain of ignorance, of not knowing if those he loved even realized he was alive.
 
          For Jill Morrell, the five years of John’s captivity were a different kind of hell: the initial shock and disbelief; the gradual acceptance that John had been taken and that her life was changed irrevocably, that all their plans had been shattered. But even as she began to pick up the threads of her life, she was refusing to give up hope. For five years she battled with the mandarins of the Foreign Office; she and a group of friends launched the Friends of John McCarthy, and worked ceaselessly on the behalf of all the British hostages in the Middle East, until the extraordinary day in August 1991 when John McCarthy stepped down from an aeroplane at RAF Lyneham.