Book description
When Eileen Munro's mother became pregnant at 16, she was told to
give her baby away to a 'good family', but the couple who paid the fee
at the Salvation Army mother-and-baby home in Glasgow in 1963 turned
out to be alcoholics who neglected and physically abused Eileen. Then,
when their marriage broke down, they failed to protect her from sexual
abuse at the hands of a family friend.
After watching her adoptive mother drown on inhaled vomit, Eileen
and her younger sister were taken into care, but her nightmare was to
continue as she was subjected to further physical, sexual and
emotional abuse.
At the age of only seventeen, seven months into a secret pregnancy,
she decided that the only way out was through a bottle of painkillers;
when she survived and gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, he became
her lifeline.
Eileen Munro is a trained photographer and a committed campaigner,
publicist and feature writer for the UK brain injury charity Headway.
She has addressed a cross-party committee of the Scottish Parliament
investigating the extent of child sexual abuse in Scotland. She lives
in South Lanarkshire and is currently studying creative writing
through Open University.
Carol McKay teaches creative writing with the Open University and
her fiction has appeared in literary magazines, including
Chapman and Mslexia. In 2002, she was a finalist in the
prestigious Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Competition
and in 2007 an extract from her work-in-progress novel was shortlisted
in the Daily Telegraph Novel in a Year competition.
