A Woman of Independence

As a young student visiting East Timor in the early 1990s, Kirsty Sword found herself deeply moved by the people she met and the stories she heard, and before long she found herself a passionate advocate of Timorese independence. Yet little did she know that her fervour for the cause would become intertwined with a very different sort of passion. Over the next decade, working as an undercover activist in Jakarta, Kirsty became an increasingly valuable operative within the East Timorese independence movement. In 1994 her work brought her into contact with the jailed leader of the resistance movement, the charismatic Xanana Gusmao. Through their letters, smuggled in and out of his prison, they fell in love. This unlikely but remarkable romance was further tested when Kirsty was forced to flee Indonesia one step ahead of its feared intelligence service. It was not until the fall of President Suharto and Xanana's subsequent release that the two were finally reunited. Working beside Xanana, Kirsty found herself at the very centre of the epic events that saw East Timor freed from Indonesian occupation. She was beside him as he became the president of the world's newest nation, just as Xanana was beside her as she gave birth to their child, Alexandre, in Dili, one of the first citizens to be born in a country now released from its shackles. Today, the former guerrilla commander and the undercover resistance operative live together as president and first lady, with their two children, in a country where fear has been replaced by hope. A Woman of Independence is the compulsively readable story of an incredible love affair, and the passion and courage it takes to free a nation.