“It was as if Pandora’s Box had opened. The course of my life changed and in one moment, I went from being a cherished child to an abused child. I was marked.”

Emily enjoyed a golden childhood until, at age seven, her beautiful mother began too see her as a rival and turned on her. She became addicted to beating Emily and encouraged her new husband, a narcissistic bully, to whip her. By the time Emily was 12, he was sexually abusing her.

Emily found her way into the care system, where she was vulnerable to the worst excesses of male violence. She ran away many times and was drawn into life as an underage prostitute servicing perverted clients.

Set principally between 1966 and 1972, Runaway is a shocking book that brilliantly captures the sleazy Soho of the period and exposes the frightening conditions in which many children were kept in care.