Nothing is all black or all white. And nobody is all good or all evil. That also goes for the kidnapper. These are words people don't like
to hear from an abduction victim.

This declaration, made halfway through Natascha Kampusch's account of her eight years of imprisonment, torture and degradation, is as shocking as anything else in this frequently shocking book. But more of that in a moment.

If you read the papers, you will think, as I did, that you know Kampusch's story. But, as is so often the case with the unimaginable, it's the small details that chill. She was ten when, in 1998, she was grabbed on the way to school in Vienna and thrown into a van. She had just had an argument with her mother and had left without saying goodbye - which would torment her for years. Her kidnapper, Wolfgang Priklopil, confined her in a cellar less than five metres square and so securely barricaded that it took him an hour to get in and out.

Over the next eight years, Kampusch was subjected to semi-starvation, days and nights of darkness, and extreme emotional and physical cruelty. But she also ate a few meals with her kidnapper, was sometimes allowed up into the house for a bath or TV, and was given books and computer games. Sometimes he spoke kindly to her; other times he abused and tormented her. Her view is that he craved a plaything. He'd chosen a child, and when she reached puberty he was horrified: what if she bled on his sofa and left DNA evidence for the police to find?

In the final couple of years (oddly, considering his fears), Priklopil allowed her one or two forays into the outside world, most notably a day trip skiing. It wasn't as good as it sounds: she was weak from starvation and disorientated by the colossal sensory overload.

Some have wondered why, on these occasions, Kampusch didn't just run for it. Well, she did, eventually. But here she accounts for those years of delay with unbearable clarity. Like a dog who knows and understands only the sadism of its owner, Kampusch was by now so psychologically broken that at times she no longer even needed a leash.

And yet, right from those first terrifying moments in Priklopil's van, she demonstrated the spirit that almost certainly saved her. Trying to play detective, she asked him what his shoe size was. On the first night, dreading the eventual darkness, she demanded that he read her
a bedtime story (the image of Priklopil sitting there and obediently reading her "The Princess and the Pea" is uniquely unsettling). Later she begged for crayons and drew pictures of her real home - doorways, furniture - all over her prison walls and, in a small act of defiance that pinches at your heart, scrawled a tiny swear word in the corner.

The defiance went further. When Priklopil demanded that she call him "Maestro", she refused. Nor would she ever kneel before him - and she was beaten for it. Although the physical abuse to which he subjected her (the catalogue of her almost daily injuries makes sickening reading) remained constant, slowly the balance of power shifted. When, weeks before her escape, she calmly informed him that only one of them could come out of this alive, he amazed her by doing nothing. He had, in effect, passed her the key.

Still, the aspect of Kampusch's behaviour that moves me most intensely is the one that the world and the press seem to have found hardest to accept. She forgave her kidnapper. Not just afterwards, when he had thrown himself under a train. She forgave him even at the time, when he beat her so hard he almost cracked her skull, then left her lying in the dark without food for two days. Again and again, she convinced herself that he was just a weak man who deserved her sympathy. How she managed this, I don't know. But I suspect it explains how she managed to hold on to her sanity. So it seems almost too shaming to realise that she emerged from those years of terror, isolation and brutality, only to be questioned and suspected because she did not slot precisely into the complacent public's idea of suffering yet vengeful victimhood.

In fact, Kampusch's mix of resilience, self-belief and teenage rebelliousness frequently reminds me of Anne Frank. Like Anne, she refuses to be defined by her traumatic experience. And, again like Anne, she seems extraordinary in her own right. You suspect that, even without the malign intervention of Priklopil, she would have made her mark on public life. I bet she still will.

In the end, that is why her book rises far above a standard tabloid horror story (and the occasionally tabloid-style prose) and demands to
be read; it is more complex, more important. Somewhere in this young woman's courageous and creative response to a randomly brutal act, it is possible to glimpse all that is best and most exhilarating about being human.

3,096 Days
Natascha Kampusch
Penguin, 256pp, £7.99

Julie Myerson's most recent book is "The Lost Child" (Bloomsbury, £7.99)