Abie Longstaff is the eldest of six children and grew up in Australia, Hong Kong and France. She knows all about squabbling, chaos and bossing younger sisters around. So she logically began her career as a barrister. She started writing when her children were born. Her favourite childhood books were Hating Alison Ashley, A Little Princess, Maura's Angel and The Black Stallion and she sneakily reads them again sometimes. Abie lives in Hove with her family.

Abie Longstaff

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Colin Fry

Twins Ron and Reg Kray were without doubt the most powerful, violent and deadly gangsters that London has ever known. They ran protection rackets, clubs and casinos, as well as fraudulent 'long firms'. They blackmailed, intimidated and killed - for many years with impunity thanks to their powerful cronies in the Establishment. Working with all five main Mafia families in New York, they were expanding their business worldwide when they were imprisoned for murder in 1968. 
 
 Featuring revealing new material, The Krays: A Violent Business is the story of their lives - and of the secrets and scandals the British government still doesn't want you to know about.

The Krays: A Violent Business

The Definitive Inside Story of Britain's Most Notorious Brothers in Crime

Eugenie Fraser

The House by the Dvina is the riveting story of two families separated in culture and geography but bound together by a Russian-Scottish marriage. It includes episodes as romantic and dramatic as any in fiction: the purchase by the author's great-grandfather of a peasant girl with whom he had fallen in love; the desperate sledge journey in the depths of winter made by her grandmother to intercede with Tsar Aleksandr II for her husband; the extraordinary courtship of her parents; and her Scottish granny being caught up in the abortive revolution of 1905. 
 
 Eugenie Fraser herself was brought up in Russia but was taken on visits to Scotland. She marvellously evokes a child's reactions to two totally different environments, sets of customs and family backgrounds, while the characters are beautifully drawn and splendidly memorable. 
 
 With the events of 1914 to 1920 - the war with Germany, the Revolution, the murder of the Tsar and the withdrawal of the Allied Intervention in the north - came the disintegration of Russia and of family life. The stark realities of hunger, deprivation and fear are sharply contrasted with the adventures of childhood. The reader shares the family's suspense and concern about the fates of its members and relives with Eugenie her final escape to Scotland. 
 
 In The House by the Dvina, Eugenie Fraser has vividly and poignantly portrayed a way of life that finally disappeared in violence and tragedy.

The House by the Dvina

A Russian Childhood

Martha Long

In this latest instalment of Martha Long's real-life account of abuse, deprivation and cruelty at the hands of her mother's partner and the establishment, Martha is now 16 and her time at the convent school is up. In Ma, It's a Cold Aul Night an I'm Lookin for a Bed, she leads us through her first months of freedom. 
 
 With no home to go to, Martha leaves the convent carrying her suitcase and a burning ambition to shake off her impoverished past. Hungry to become a person who will blend in with the middle classes, Martha yearns to be accepted as someone who can be loved, respected, and one day have a home of her own where she will be safe. But this is 1960s Dublin, where poverty is rife and the Church works together with the Irish government to keep the poor and the ignorant in their place. 
 
 Martha first finds work as a home help with a loving, lively family, which leads her to a job in a shop, an Italian fish and chip café, then as a skivvy in a miserable household where she is reminded of the terror Jackser brought into her life. Chance meetings with brothers and old friends from the convent lift Martha's spirits, but soon she is back on the streets searching for work and a warm bed to call her own. 
 
 Martha is not often deterred when fate deals her a blow. 'Life is a bowl of cherries!' she reasons. But heartache awaits as people turn her away and predators lurk in the shadows.

Ma, It's a Cold Aul Night an I'm Lookin for a Bed

Bernard O'Mahoney

Trouble in Mind is bernard o'mahoney's unblinkingly honest account of his eventful life so far. 
 
 Growing up in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, O'Mahoney regularly bore the brunt of his father's psychotic violence. After a spell in the army, he served two prison sentences for wounding, before moving to Basildon and forming the Essex Boys firm, one of the most successful and violent criminal gangs in British history. 
 
 When O'Mahoney quit the firm, he received death threats from his partners, who were murdered less than a fortnight later. He was arrested in the aftermath of the triple murder but was never charged. 
 
 As he began to distance himself from his shady past, tragedy struck when his young wife died suddenly and, grieving, he spiralled out of control and ended up serving another spell in prison. 
 
 The Essex Boys firm has been the subject of three films and numerous books, but the gang's infamous activities are only one remarkable aspect of O'Mahoney's extraordinary life story, which he candidly recounts in this gripping memoir.

Trouble in Mind

An Autobiography

Paul Chandler

Rachel Chandler

Sarah Edworthy

On 23 October 2009, British couple Paul and Rachel Chandler were kidnapped from their sailing boat in the archipelago of the Seychelles. 
 
Their yacht, Lynn Rival, was recovered six days later by naval forces, abandoned off the central Somali coast. 
 
After the attack, Paul and Rachel were taken first onto a previously hijacked merchant ship and then to Somalia, where they were held for over a year, enduring threats and intimidation while their captors tried to extort millions of dollars from their family. 
 
In this remarkable book, the Chandlers recount their terrifying ordeal, revealing the inspiring and poignant story behind the dramatic headlines. At the heart of their survival was their unshakeable belief in each other and their determination to survive, making Hostage an unlikely love story; for Paul and Rachel, death, at times, seemed preferable to being separated.

Hostage

A Year at Gunpoint with Somali Gangsters

Frank Kane

John Tilsley

Following the collapse of his business and the loss of his home, Frank Kane made a catastrophic decision. In desperation, he agreed to smuggle cocaine out of Venezuela. Almost inevitably, he and his girlfriend, Sam, were caught. 
 
The price they paid was a ten-year sentence in the hell of the overcrowded Venezuelan prison system, notorious for corruption and abuse, and rife with weapons and gangs. At one point, Frank was held in the remote El Dorado prison, better known for being the one-time home of Henri Charrière, or Papillon. He witnessed countless murders as gang leaders fought for power, and he had to become as ruthless as his fellow inmates in order to survive. In an attempt to dull the reality of the horrendous conditions, he succumbed to drugs. 
 
After enduring years of systematic beatings by the guards and attempts on his life by inmates, Frank suffered more than one breakdown. He lost over four stone and was riddled with disease, but somehow he found the strength within himself to survive and was eventually released in 2004 after serving over seven years of his sentence. During the long walk back from hell, Frank decided to tell his story.

In the Shadow of Papillon

Seven Years of Hell in Venezuela's Prison System

Andy Goram

Iain King

This is the story of a genius with flaws. Lots of them. On the field, Andy Goram was a defiant figure between the sticks who, in many ways, defined the history-making nine-in-a-row team that brought so much success to Ibrox; off it, he careered through three divorces and a welter of lurid tabloid headlines sensationalising his hellraising antics. 
 
 In this no-holds-barred account, Goram lifts the lid on his tempestuous life in football, from the Gers' glory days to a fairy-tale chapter with his boyhood heroes: Manchester United. His life in the Old Firm is examined in depth, from the saves that broke former Celtic manager Tommy Burns's heart to a story that was buried until now: Celtic's astonishing bid to sign him. 
 
 Goram's Scotland career ended in bitterness when he walked out on the squad before France 98, and here he smashes the myths that have always surrounded his relationships with Craig Brown and Jim Leighton. 
 
 This is the inside story of the man the fans voted Rangers' greatest-ever goalkeeper. He remains a genius with flaws: a legend simply known as The Goalie.

The Goalie

My Story

Bill Jones

The mystery man threw off his disguise and started to run. Furious stewards gave chase. The crowd roared. 
 
A legend was born. Soon the world would know him as 'the ghost runner'. John Tarrant. The extraordinary man whom nobody could stop. As a hapless teenage boxer in the 1950s, he'd been paid £17 expenses. When he wanted to run, he was banned for life. His amateur status had been compromised. Forever. Now he was fighting back, gatecrashing races all over Britain. No number on his shirt. No friends in high places. Soon he would be a record-breaker, one of the greatest long-distance runners the world has ever seen. 
 
This is his true story: The Ghost Runner.

The Ghost Runner

The Tragedy of the Man They Couldn't Stop

Colin MacFarlane

Colin MacFarlane was born in the Gorbals in the 1950s, 20 years after the publication of No Mean City, the classic novel about pre-war life in what was once Glasgow's most deprived district. He lived in the same street as its fictional 'razor king', Johnnie Stark, and subsequently realised that a lot of the old characters represented in the book were still around as late as the 1960s. Men still wore bunnets and played pitch and toss; women still wore headscarves and treated the steamie as their social club. The razor gangs were running amok once again, human waste ran down the tenement stairs, and filth, violence, crime, rats, poverty and drunkenness abounded, just like they did in No Mean City. 
 
 MacFarlane witnessed the last days of the old Gorbals as a major regeneration programme, begun in 1961, was implemented, and, as a street boy, he had a unique insight into a once great community in rapid decline. He witnessed drunken fights, gang battles, police corruption and even the occasional stabbing, slashing and murder. But the Gorbals had another side: one where ordinary hard-working people were trying to survive in what was arguably once the most notorious area in the world. 
 
 In this engrossing new book, MacFarlane reveals what it was really like to live in the old Gorbals.

The Real Gorbals Story

True Tales from Glasgow's Meanest Streets

At 16, Martha collapses on the streets, suffering from starvation and exposure. She has reached rock bottom, but after Martha is taken to hospital, Lady Luck smiles kindly on her and she is given the opportunity to get off the streets for ever. 
 
Before long, Martha is on the way to leading the normal life she has so long dreamt of. She makes friends, begins to put the misery of her past behind her and even experiences her first taste of love. 
 
For her, love is a powerful feeling. She has never experienced real affection before and is now plunged into the complex world of love between a man and a woman. The intense emotion consumes her, for this is a forbidden love that can never be requited. After all, Ralph Fitzgerald is a priest, and he will never break his vow of chastity. This love brings heartbreaking consequences and changes the direction of Martha's life for ever . . .

Ma, Now I'm Goin Up in the World

Helen Croydon

Frustrated with her stalled career as a broadcast journalist and uninspired by dating naive and needy guys her own age, Helen Croydon joins a website to seek an older man. She expects it to be just a few fun dates in some fancy bars but finds herself propelled into a world of Prada shopping trips, fine dining, first-class travel and fascinating, powerful men. 
 
 Helen's soul-searching dating adventures take her to New York, Malaysia, highbrow sex parties, top ski resorts and London's finest hotels. When one of her dates alludes to a monthly allowance, she is shocked, but how long will her resistance to the idea last? 
 
 Sugar Daddy Diaries is a confessional true story that questions modern ideals about relationships, examines the attraction of power and asks if money can ever be the currency of love.

Sugar Daddy Diaries

When a Fantasy Became an Obsession

Sebastian Williams

Send Them to Hell is a horrifying, authentic chronicle of life as lived by foreign inmates over the past two decades in Bangkok's notorious prison system. 
 
Murder, human-rights abuse, drugs, blackmail, extortion, extreme violence, medical maltreatment and unjustifiable death penalties feature as everyday occurrences in the living hells that are Bangkwang and Klong Prem jails. 
 
 Sebastian Williams has graphically revealed this shocking reality through the eyes of a long-term inmate from the West who endured at first hand the unimaginable, inhuman nightmare that constitutes the Thai penal system.

Send Them to Hell

The Brutal Horrors of Bangkok's Nightmare Jails

Rosalinda V. Hutton

After an idyllic early childhood in Surrey, Linda's life descended into poverty and chaos when her parents' marriage crumbled and her unstable mother's sanity declined. 
 
She experienced a brief period of comfort in a caring foster home before being plunged into the dark, terrifying world of a 1960s institution. St Anne's Convent, Orpington, was a Catholic children's home run by the infamous Sisters of Mercy and a former monk who inflicted bizarre and barbaric beliefs and practices on the children in his care. 
 
Cry and You Cry Alone is the achingly honest story of a survivor of shocking child abuse that took place in the heart of an English suburb.

Cry and You Cry Alone

The Girl Who Vowed She'd Never Forget

Martha is now in her thirties. Her daughter has left home and she is lonely and vulnerable. The hard knocks have taken their toll on her health, and as she looks into the years still lying ahead of her, she shakes her head, feeling she hasn't the heart or the strength to go on. 
 
 As she teeters on the brink of a nervous breakdown, a phone call summons ghosts from the past. She discovers that one of the family is dead and the others need her help. Martha returns and when she comes face to face with the evil, psychotic Jackser, she can no longer suppress the nightmares of her childhood. 
 
 A suicide attempt sees her admitted to the 'mad house', where a hunger strike takes her even nearer to death. But finally she sees a chink of light at the end of the tunnel. Could love in an unexpected form pull her back from the brink?

Ma, I've Got Meself Locked Up in the Mad House

Josephine Duthie

Say Nothing is the moving true story of four neglected siblings who were taken into care following the breakdown of their parents' marriage. Sent to a small croft in the north-east of Scotland, they endured an onslaught of physical and mental abuse at the hands of an elderly, inexperienced foster mother. 
 
 For ten years the children's cries for help were ignored and misunderstood in the naive social-work climate of the late 1950s, and this heartbreaking personal account of cruelty and neglect reveals the effect this maltreatment had on their ability to adjust to a normal adult life. 
 
 Say Nothing was written as a voice of support for all abused children who are afraid or were never given the chance to tell their story.

Say Nothing

The Harrowing Truth About Auntie's Children

Kathy O'Beirne

'I feel my story had to be told. So much evil was done there was a voice inside me shouting, "Justice".' 
 
With no one to confide in, Kathy suffered in silence as she was battered by her father and molested by local boys. 
 
At the age of eight, she was torn from her family and incarcerated in a series of Catholic homes. When she was sent to a psychiatric unit, she suffered terrifying electric- shock therapy and further cruelty at the hands of her supposed carers. 
 
After ending up in a Magdalen laundry, she fell victim to sexual abuse and gave birth to baby Annie just weeks before her fourteenth birthday. Don't Ever Tell is Kathy's harrowing account of her ruined childhood and of her subsequent fight for justice.

Don't Ever Tell

Kathy's Story: A True Tale of a Childhood Destroyed by Neglect and Fear

Jan de Vries

In Emotional Healing, world-renowned alternative-health expert Jan de Vries turns his attention to the myriad of mental and emotional conditions that he has seen increase amongst his patients in recent years. 
 
 This important new addition to the Jan de Vries Healthcare series offers practical advice on how to cope with the emotional effects of unhappy relationships and broken marriages, suggests ways of eradicating depression and suicidal thoughts, reveals how to combat feelings of resentment and jealousy, and advises on how to avoid the health pitfalls linked to modern working life, such as stress and anxiety. 
 
 The book pinpoints effective ways in which to overcome feelings of guilt and trauma that arise from unfortunate situations such as road accidents. It also explores the wealth of complex emotions related to degenerative diseases, such as cancer, multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy, and offers helpful tips on how to cope at such times. 
 
 Emotional Healing is an essential handbook for those of us who are emotionally and mentally affected by the many pressures of life in the twenty-first century. It will lift spirits and bring some positivity back into the lives of those who may have started to give up hope.

Emotional Healing

Complementary Solutions for a Stress-Free Life

After a failed suicide attempt and recovery in the mad house, Martha is heading for France to be reunited with the one true love of her life. 
 
Father Ralph Fitzgerald rescued her from the streets when she was sixteen and was the first person to show Martha true love and affection. But their relationship threatened his vocation and he eventually fled to Africa to take up missionary work. 
 
Martha never got over losing him and now, after nearly twenty years, he has made contact again. She sets off on a mission to find him and uncover his motives for getting in touch. Does he still love her? Has he left the priesthood? Is he now free to marry her? She needs to know what the future is going to hold.

Ma, I've Reached for the Moon an I'm Hittin the Stars

Maureen Coppinger

The shocking but ultimately uplifting life story of an Irish woman who endured 13 years of cruelty and injustice in an orphanage 
 
Maureen Coppinger's earliest memory is of watching the woman she believed to be her mother walk away and abandon her to the care of the nuns at one of Ireland's notorious industrial schools. She was just three years old. 
 
She remained in the orphanage until the age of 16, subjected to cruelty and neglect, and starved of love and affection. It was an environment from which no one emerged unscathed. 
 
Throughout these tormented years, Maureen dreamed only of escape, and when she was contacted again by her mammy she believed all her dreams were about to come true. Life in the outside world brought its own challenges, however, and Maureen was thrown into turmoil when she discovered that the truth about her past was more murky than she had ever realised. 
 
Annie's Girl stands apart as a poignant testimony to the resilience of the human heart. This touching and evocative memoir is the incredible story of an illegitimate industrial-school survivor's profound struggle to overcome a shame-filled past and solve the mystery of her origins. 
 
Maureen Coppinger emigrated to Canada in 1955, where she married and raised three sons. She worked as a school secretary for 25 years before retiring in 1994 and now spends her leisure time as a volunteer for the Galway Association.

Annie's Girl

How an Abandoned Orphan Finally Discovered the Truth About Her Mother

Aged thirteen, Martha is rescued by the courts from the clutches of her evil stepfather, Jackser, and her feckless mother, Sally. After numerous arrests for shoplifting, a judge rules that she is to be sent to a convent school with the instruction that she is to get an education. 
 
 Her initial relief at escaping the abuse and neglect she suffered at home is, however, short-lived, as she soon realises that there are many forms of cruelty in this life. As she says, 'You can have a full belly, but your heart can be very empty.' Ostracised by the other children for being a 'street kid' and put to back-breaking work by the nuns, she leads a lonely existence, her only joy coming from the books she devours and her mischievous sense of humour. 
 
 Desperate for love and a little place where she feels she belongs, despite all that she has suffered Martha retains her compassion for others and still continues to hope for a brighter future when she will be free to make her own way in life.

Ma, I'm Gettin Meself a New Mammy

Born a bastard to a teenage mother in the slums of 1950s Dublin, Martha has to be a fighter from the very start. 
 
As her mother moves from man to man, and more children follow, they live hand-to-mouth in squalid, freezing tenements, clothed in rags and forced to beg for food. But just when it seems things can't get any worse, her mother meets Jackser. 
 
Despite her trials, Martha is a child with an irrepressible spirit and a wit beyond her years. She tells the story of her early life without an ounce of self-pity and manages to recreate a lost era in which the shadow of the Catholic Church loomed large and if you didn't work, you didn't eat. 
 
Martha never stops believing she is worth more than the hand she has been dealt, and her remarkable voice will remain with you long after you've finished the last line.

Ma, He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes

Sanello

Julia Roberts is the top female box-office star in the world,the highest grossing actress of the past decade,according to a poll by Warner Bros.Her films have raked in half a billion dollars.The auburn-haired superstar recently cracked the all-male $20-million-per-picture club whose chartr members include Tom Cruise,Mel Gibson,Jim Carrey and Tom Hanks. Last summer,Roberts starred in not one but two romantic comedies that seemed as close as possible to being sure-fire hits.Notting Hill,abouta shy London bookshop owner who falls in love with an American movie star,paired her with Hugh Grant and the creative team that made Four Weddings and a Funeral an international hit.Runaway Bride,a vaguely autobiographical tale about a woman who repeatedly dumps her groom at the alter,re-teamed Roberts with her Pretty Woman collaborators,Richard Gere and director Garry Marshll. In the upcoming Erin Brockovich,which nabbed her the record breaking $20 million payday,the actress gets to flex her dramatic muscles in a real life story about a legal secretary who helps win a giant class-action lawsuit against a major industrial polluter.

Julia Roberts

Pretty Superstar

Louise Monaghan

In the middle of one of the worst civil wars in Syria's history, Louise Monaghan crossed a heavily guarded border to save her six-year-old daughter from the father who had callously snatched her from her home in Cyprus. Not knowing what lay ahead, the Irish mother tricked her ex-husband into believing she still loved him and wanted them to live together as a family, purely so that she could see her kidnapped child again. 
 
Once in his homeland, Louise too was held captive, locked inside a run-down house day and night with little food and no hope of being released. Sick from polluted water, severely beaten by her ex-husband and abandoned by the Turkish men paid to rescue her, she took her little girl and made a daring escape. 
 
The journey they made through bomb attacks and sniper fire, and across a heavily patrolled mountain range in the dead of night, was a harrowing ordeal. Yet miraculously they both survived, and Stolen is Louise's breathtaking account of events.

Stolen

Escape from Syria

Clare Gee

Addicted to coke and booze and reliant on selling her body for cash, Katie, the heroine of Clare Gee's bestselling Hooked, can no longer cope with the life she's created for herself. She has messed up badly and thrown everything away. 
 
 Mentally, she is an anxious wreck and physically she is in pieces. Yet she is terrified of who she will become without her vices. She has to do something, though, and her choices are get help or die. She leaves London and admits herself to a residential rehab centre for three months. 
 
 In Unhooked, reformed addict Clare Gee draws on her own experiences of cocaine addiction, alcoholism and prostitution in telling a moving story of a young woman battling through hell to create a sober life for herself. There are threats of expulsion from rehab and relapses, but through dedication and honesty, Katie begins the long journey to becoming clean and finding peace of mind.

Unhooked

The Rehab of a London Call Girl

In Neck and Back Problems Jan de Vries deals with many of the most common problems relating to the spine. Drawing on his own vast experience of helping patients overcome their suffering and on various case histories, this book contains practical advice for those millions who endure the agony of backache. Simple exercises and remedies are outlined, together with proven hints towards self-treatment. Slipped discs, tennis elbow, 'whiplash', bursitis and problems with vertigo are all discussed in layman's terms. Neck and Back is a veritable treasure trove of information from one of the world's leading practitioners in this field.

Neck and Back Problems

Loung Ung

In 1980, at the age of ten, Loung Ung escaped a devastated Cambodia and flew to the US as a refugee. 
 
 She and her eldest brother, with whom she escaped, left behind their three surviving siblings, and her book is alternately heart-wrenching and heart-warming, as it follows the parallel lives of Loung and her closest sister, Chou, during the 15 years it took for them to be reunited. 
 
 Their two worlds were very different, and Loung's depiction of the contrast between her life in the affluent West and that of her sister, who navigated her way through landmine-strewn fields and survived raids by the Khmer Rouge, is laced with the guilt she feels about being the lucky one. 
 
 This powerful story helps us to understand what happens when a family is torn apart by politics, adversity and war. It is also the compelling and inspirational tale of a remarkable woman.

After They Killed Our Father

A Refugee from the Killing Fields Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind

David Ewart

May Ewart

Say goodbye to squashed feet, sore toes and dizzy heads with Scottish Ceilidh Dancing. Guiding you through intricate dance steps and various hand holds in simple, straightforward language, this book introduces you to the exuberant world of the Dashing White Sergeant, the Gay Gordons, the Gypsy Tap and the Lucky Seven, to name but a few. All your old favourites are here and, with over fifty dances, there's something for everyone, from the simple routines of the Dinkie One-Step, to the more adventurous Southern Rose Waltz and the Posties Jig.

Scottish Ceilidh Dancing

William Queen

When veteran law-enforcement officer and lifelong motorcycle lover William Queen penetrated the San Fernando chapter of the notorious Mongols, he was at the mercy of psychopaths who sought to have him prove his fealty by any means necessary, from selling and doing drugs to arms trafficking, driving getaway cars and, in one shocking instance, stitching up the face of a Mongol 'ol' lady' after a brutal beating at the hands of her boyfriend. 
 
Yet despite the constant criminality of the gang, Queen came to see the genuine camaraderie they shared. When his lengthy undercover work totally isolated Queen from his relatives and friends, the Mongols felt like the only family he had left. Under and Alone is a breathless, adrenalin-charged read that puts you on the street with some of the most dangerous men in America.

Under and Alone

Infiltrating the World's Most Violent Motorcycle Gang

On hearing that Jackser, her childhood abuser, is seriously ill, Martha is elated, thinking that finally she will be able to watch him suffer. But in the hospital she sees a frightened, lonely old man and realises with a shock that he seems to regret his earlier actions. 
 
During her vigil, she is joined by Charlie, her beloved little brother, then the ma and some of her other siblings. All of them have suffered greatly and it is clear that no one connected to Jackser has escaped unscathed. 
 
But as she sits with him during his dying days, other memories of Jackser come back to Martha – fleeting moments of concern and kindness, and a sense of closeness as he recalled his own tormented past in one of Ireland’s industrial schools. It is a vicious cycle of cruelty and loss that has played out, from which only her own tenacity and wit has provided an escape. 
 
Poignant, ribald, poetic and defiant, with its resolution of many unanswered questions about her life this is Martha at her best.

Ma, Jackser's Dyin Alone

Carol Ann Lee

Soon to be an ITV drama starring Lucy Boynton, A Cruel Love is the definitive story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in Britain. Previously published as A Fine Day for a Hanging. 
 
'A forensically researched book that casts a haunting new light on the last woman to be hanged in Britain.' —DAILY MAIL 
 
In 1955, former nightclub manageress Ruth Ellis shot her lover, David Blakely, dead. A two-day trial followed, but despite huge public outcry, she was found guilty and sentenced to death. At 28, Ruth became the last woman executed in Britain, her hanging one of the most notorious under prolific hangman Albert Pierrepoint. 
 
Carol Ann Lee examines the facts behind the headlines surrounding this infamous case, which many believe led to the dismantling of the death penalty a decade later. Drawing on interviews and in-depth research into the full range of sources, she reveals the woman behind the crime. 
 
Previously published as A Fine Day for a Hanging, this is the acclaimed biography that inspired the ITV drama, A Cruel Love – a portrait of 1950s club life in all its seedy glamour, and a tragic true tale of murder, class, love and betrayal. 
 
'Wonderful . . . it will become the standard reference on Ruth Ellis' Stewart P. Evans, crime historian

A Cruel Love

The Real Ruth Ellis Story

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