Plus a handsome, funny, street-smart boyfriend who adored her. But behind her façade of success, this golden girl hid a dark secret. She’d made a mistake shared by millions: she fell in love with the wrong person.At first Leslie and Conor seemed as perfect together as their fairy-tale wedding. Then came the fights she tried to ignore: he pushed her down the stairs of the house they bought together, poured coffee grinds over her hair as she dressed for a critical job interview, choked her during an argument, and threatened her with a gun. Several times, he came close to making good on his threat to kill her. With each attack, Leslie lost another piece of herself.Gripping and utterly compelling, Crazy Love takes you inside the violent, devastating world of abusive love. Conor said he’d been abused since he was a young boy, and love and rage danced intimately together in his psyche. Why didn’t Leslie leave? She stayed because she loved him. Find out for yourself if she had fallen truly in love – or into a psychological trap. Crazy Love will draw you in -- and never let go.

    This is a powerful true story of one young girls struggle to survive the state care system in the 70's and 80's. Amelia has just one wish, to make it to adulthood, to hold her destiny in her own hands. This is a harrowing true story, one of survival and human strength. Amelia has been separated from all her siblings never to see them again for many years, she is moved from one children's home to another, until finally it's just too much for her to bear. Amelia starts to wonder about the peace and finality of her own death.

    For no apparent reason, she's singled out from her siblings, blamed for her family's problems and targeted for unspeakable abuse. The loving environment she's come to know becomes an endless nightmare of twisted punishments as she's forced to confront the dark cruelty lurking inside the mother she idolizes. Based on a true story, Call Me Tuesday recounts, with raw emotion, a young girl's physical and mental torment at the mercy of the monster in her mother's clothes--a monster she doesn't know how to stop loving. Tuesday's painful journey through the hidden horrors of child abuse will open your eyes, and her unshakable love for her parents will tug at your heartstrings.

    The details of her cruelty were so sickening they shocked the country. Alloma Gilbert was one of Spry's young victims, left at her mercy for 11 brutal years. This is her story.

    But there comes a point in her preteen years - maybe it's the night she first tries to run away and is exposed to drugs, alcohol, and sex all at once - when Cupcake's story shifts from a tear-jerking tragedy to a dark, deeply disturbing journey through hell.Cupcake learned to survive by turning tricks, downing hard liquor and ingesting every drug she could find while hitchhiking up and down the California coast. At just 16 she stumbled into the terrifying world of the gangsta, dealing drugs, hustling and only just surviving a drive-by shooting. Ironically, it was Cupcake's rapid descent into the nightmare of crack cocaine addiction that finally saved her. After one four-day crack binge she woke up behind a dumpster. Half-dressed and half-dead, she finally realized she had to change her life or die on the streets - another trash-can addict, another sad statistic.Astonishingly, Cupcake turned her life around and this is her brutally frank, startlingly funny story. Unlike any memoir you will ever read, A Piece of Cake is a redemptive, gripping tale of a resilient spirit who took on the worst of contemporary urban life and survived it. It is also the most genuinely affecting rollercoaster ride through hell and back that you will ever take.

    NYU MFA candidate and Goldwater Fellow Alisson Wood's BEING LOLITA, a memoir of the author's two-year relationship with her high school English teacher who seduced her by teaching her Lolita, a story he had her believe was the greatest love story of our time, which she only later learned was anything but, and how revisiting Nabokov's masterpiece allowed her to grapple with what it means to have been an unreliable narrator of her own life, exploring our shifting views of consent, male dominance, and self-perception, to Sarah Murphy at Flatiron Books.

    He became first controlling, then violent, and Cathy found herself trapped in a terrifyingly abusive marriage. Eventually, for the sake of her young son, she found the strength to escape. Then in 2006 she saw on TV that her ex-husband was a serial killer.

    Until now.For years, behind the closed doors of their farmhouse in Raymond, Washington, their sadistic mother, Shelly, subjected her girls to unimaginable abuse, degradation, torture, and psychic terrors. Through it all, Nikki, Sami, and Tori developed a defiant bond that made them far less vulnerable than Shelly imagined. Even as others were drawn into their mother’s dark and perverse web, the sisters found the strength and courage to escape an escalating nightmare that culminated in multiple murders.

    Just twelve, she’s tall, skinny, and weak. It’s four o’clock, and she hasn’t been allowed to eat anything all day. Her mother, on the other hand, seems curiously excited. She's about to suggest open-heart surgery on her child to "get to the bottom of this." She checks her teeth for lipstick and, as the doctor enters, shoots the girl a warning glance. This child will not ruin her plans.SickenedFrom early childhood, Julie Gregory was continually X-rayed, medicated, and operated on—in the vain pursuit of an illness that was created in her mother’s mind. Munchausen by proxy (MBP) is the world’s most hidden and dangerous form of child abuse, in which the caretaker—almost always the mother—invents or induces symptoms in her child because she craves the attention of medical professionals. Many MBP children die, but Julie Gregory not only survived, she escaped the powerful orbit of her mother's madness and rebuilt her identity as a vibrant, healthy young woman.Sickened is a remarkable memoir that speaks in an original and distinctive Midwestern voice, rising to indelible scenes in prose of scathing beauty and fierce humor. Punctuated with Julie's actual medical records, it re-creates the bizarre cocoon of her family's isolated double-wide trailer, their wild shopping sprees and gun-waving confrontations, the astonishing naïveté of medical professionals and social workers. It also exposes the twisted bonds of terror and love that roped Julie's family together—including the love that made a child willing to sacrifice herself to win her mother's happiness. The realization that the sickness lay in her mother, not in herself, would not come to Julie until adulthood. But when it did, it would strike like lightning. Through her painful metamorphosis, she discovered the courage to save her own life—and, ultimately, the life of the girl her mother had found to replace her. Sickened takes us to new places in the human heart and spirit. It is an unforgettable story, unforgettably told.

    "A striking and original story of the journey from troubled childhood to self-aware adult."Soon to be a major motion picture starring and directed by Denzel Washington, Finding Fish is the memoir of Antwone Fisher's miraculous journey from abandonment and abuse to liberation, manhood, and extraordinary success--a modern-day Oliver Twist.Baby Boy Fisher--as he was documented in his child welfare caseworkers' reports--was raised in institutions from the moment of his birth in prison to a single mother. After beginning his life in an orphanage, Antwone was placed in a temporary foster home until, around age two, he was transferred to a second foster home. It was there, over the next thirteen years, that he endured emotional abandonment and physical abuse. Removed from this foster home not long before his sixteenth birthday, Antwone found fleeting refuge in a boys' reform school but was soon thrust into the nightmare of homelessness.Though convinced he was unwanted and unworthy, Fish, as he came to be known, refused to allow his spirit to be broken. Instead, he became determined to raise himself, to listen to social workers and teachers who intervened on his behalf, and to nurture a romantic heart along with a scathing sense of humor and a wondrous imagination--all of which sustained him with big dreams of a better day. Fatefully, just as Antwone's life on the streets hit rock bottom, he enlisted in the United States Navy, where he remained for the next eleven years. During that time, Fish became a man of the world, raised by the Navy family he created for himself.Finding Fish shows how, out of this unlikely mix of deprivation and hope, an artist was born--first as the child who painted the feelings his words dared not speak, then as a poet and storyteller who would eventually become one of Hollywood's most well-paid, sought-after screenwriters. But before he ascends those lofty steps, Antwone's story takes us from the Navy to his jobs as a federal correctional officer and then a security guard at Sony Pictures in Hollywood. In its climactic conclusion, the mystery of his identity is finally unraveled as Antwone returns to Cleveland to locate his mother's and father's surviving family members.A tumultuous and ultimately gratifying tale of self-discovery written in Fisher's gritty yet melodic literary voice, Finding Fish is an unforgettable reading experience.

    Finally, David Howarth was sent to prison for abusing Stuart's young sisters. Nobody knew the truth about Stuart's abuse until one fateful day when his father tried it again and Stuart fought back in the only way he knew how.Stuart Howarth spent the first 30 years of his life in mental and physical hell. After years of emotional torment and despair, at the age of 32, Stuart felt an overwhelming urge to see his father (who he now knows was actually his stepfather), then living in Wales. Seeking reconciliation, Stuart was only to be met by the same old abusive man.The rage, pain and confusion boiled over in Stuart and he fought back, killing his stepfather. When Stuart's story came to light in the courtroom, it was so terrible that he received the minimum possible sentence for his crime and only served 13 months in Strangeways prison in Manchester.But while in prison, the cruel system compounded the crimes of his evil abuser, and he suffered at the hands of the prison guards. What happened to him during those months led to him suing the Home Office and Strangeways on his release and winning his case. This is the story of a sweet-natured boy who grew into a brave young man and refused to allow himself to be a victim any longer.

    Aged seven, she has a paranoid schizophrenic for a mother and her father is a distant memory. So when Tina gets a new step-dad, who lavishes sweets and cuddles upon her, she feels wanted for the first time ever.Sadly, her new daddy isn't all that he seems. He begins to sexually abuse Tina, using chilling threats to scare her into silence.Tina is so terrified, she even gives birth to four of her step-father's children without breathing a word. Her world becomes so warped the cruelty she endures seems normal. Until eventually, the tragic death of one of her innocent children makes her see otherwise...This is the inspiring true story of how a frightened little girl grew into a fighter and finally found the strength to escape the man who stole her childhood.

    She has created a foundation to help prevent crimes against children and is a frequent public speaker. In 2012, she married Matthew Gilmour, whom she met doing mission work in Paris for her church, in a fairy tale wedding that made the cover of People magazine.

    The moving, uplifting true story of an unlikely friendship between a man on the streets and the ginger cat who adopts him and helps him heal his life.

    The memoir of a woman, tricked and trapped into sexual slavery as a young teenager.