A young adventurer with a history of seeking impossible challenges, Kira Salak became the first person in the world to kayak alone the six hundred miles on the Niger River to Timbuktu-"the golden city of the Middle Ages" and fabled "doorway to the end of the world."

While Salak ventures into one of the most desolate regions in Africa, looming as a reminder of the danger she faces is the fate of great Scottish explorer Mungo Park, killed on the same route in 1797. Enduring tropical storms, hippos, rapids, the unrelenting heat of the Sahara, and the mercurial moods of the river, Salak learns that little has changed since Park's time. When she comes ashore each night to find food and shelter among locals in mud-hut villages, tribes alternatively revere and revile her, and Salak, in turn, is equally fascinated and infuriated by the traditions she encounters. Surviving dysentery and rapacious pursuers, Salak arrives at her destination weak but triumphant, and achieves her ultimate goal of buying the freedom of two Bella slave women.

Unputdownable and breathtakingly suspenseful, The Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu is a beautifully rendered meditation on courage and self-mastery by an audacious and inspiring young traveler and wordsmith.