THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

When a fancy car pulls up outside six-year-old Marie's home in 1959, her dad tells her she is going on holiday.

But little does she know she will not see her home again for four long years. Her family cannot afford to keep her at home.

Marie tells the story of how she was taken away from a poor, but happy and loving home life, to live in a convent - away from everyone and everything she holds dear. Her hair is bluntly chopped, her clothes are taken away, and her name is changed. Then a horrific ritual of physical, sexual and mental abuse begins.

Even after the convent closes, Marie is unable to share details of her suffering with anyone. But when a police investigation is launched, Marie realises that the time has come to tell the truth...

Monica was just five years old when her mother tried to kill her by forcing her head under running bathroom taps. She had already tried to strangle her as a baby.

Escaping into foster care, Monica would go on to experience horrific physical and sexual abuse at the hands of those she hoped would protect her.

She tried to find a new life and raise a loving family of her own. But living with the devastating secrets that had been buried for so long proved too painful.

Enough was enough. To live again, she knew she had to confront the demons of her past.

‘I am just an ordinary mum, yet I would go to the ends of the earth to get justice for my daughter’

Despite suffering major health problems and needing daily care, Jodey Whiting was devastated when the powers-that-be unfairly declared her ‘fit to work’ and halted her benefit payments. While waiting for her appeal and with no money coming in, the mum of nine tragically killed herself. She was just 42.

A Mother’s Job is the moving, inspirational story of how Jodey’s mum, Joy Dove, took on the might of the system to set the record straight and save others from the same fate. A 67-year-old former cleaner and shop-worker, she is intimidated by nothing and nobody.

‘Each time my mother laid a finger on me… it was another step into the jaws of hell. Her abuse, more so than any other, destroyed me. It was the ultimate betrayal.’

Abused from the age of eight by her older brother and then her step-father, Maureen Wood quickly became numb to the constant suffering. But Maureen’s world crumbled when her own mother started to abuse her too…

A Family Secret is the harrowing true story of how one little girl survived sickening abuse by the people who should have loved her most, and how an innocent baby finally saved her.

A deadly secret. A horrifying discovery.

For over 20 years, Joanne Lee's mother kept the remains of not one, but three newborn babies hidden in a bin in her wardrobe. She had buried a fourth baby in newspaper and rags in St Helens Cemetery. For the first time since exposing her mother's crimes, Joanne breaks her silence over her family's horrific ordeal and her fight for justice for the siblings she never knew.

Growing up in chaotic circumstances on Merseyside, Joanne suffered at the hands of a violent boyfriend and controlling relatives, as her mother lapsed into a downward spiral of drinking and casual sex following the break-up of her marriage. But the consequences of her mother's messy lifestyle turned out to be far worse than Joanne could ever have imagined.

She already knew about the baby buried in a shallow makeshift grave next to the family plot. But when Joanne came across a red plastic bin in her mother's wardrobe in 2009, she realised that the family home held an even more sinister secret.

In Silent Sisters, the daughter who was falsely accused of murdering her own baby sister will tell her full story for the first time, detailing her struggle to understand her mother, to piece together the truth and to give the four babies the proper burial they deserve.