It is nearly a decade since Sally Lane received the phone call that changed her life for ever. It came from her elder son, Jack Letts, then 18, who had been travelling in Jordan on a gap-year trip from their home in Oxford. “Mum, I’m in Syria,” Jack said, beginning a chain of events that saw Lane lose her home and her job and, for a time, her freedom. Jack was calling from Raqqa, where he had gone in search of a Muslim caliphate he had fatefully, adolescently, come to idealise, before the horrors of Islamic State were known to the world.
“It is difficult to describe the terror of knowing your child is in the most dangerous place on earth and there is nothing you can do about it,” Lane writes in her frank and clear-eyed account of the years that followed. Her book is a tale of survival and an account of the legal process that consumed her and her husband, John Letts, in the name of counter-terrorism. The thread that runs through the story is Lane’s maternal refusal to give up on a son who became known as a pariah across the world (“Jihadi Jack” as he was christened in 2016 by a Sunday Times journalist) and who was subsequently stripped of citizenship by a government more concerned with headlines than justice. A son who remains to this day in a Kurdish prison, long convicted in the public mind, with scant evidence, of association with crimes against humanity.
