Barry and Cheryl had become famous. Desperately poor, living in a tower block with their two small children, they were possibly the most famous family in the country after the royals. Their fame had come not from wealth or success or glamour but from the attentions of a television company, who had made them the subject of a fly-on-the-wall documentary.
Cheryl was prepared to do anything - anything - to be a media star. She thought that the public loved her, and, indeed, for a while it seemed that the nation had taken this simple, gutsy, poverty-stricken couple to its heart. But then it all starts to go horribly wrong. Cheryl has a third baby and is transformed in the public's eyes from a plucky but unlucky trier into a profligate sponger on the state. She desperately wants to be loved - and then, mysteriously, all her three children go missing. Have they been abducted? Murdered? Or is there some even more sinister explanation for their disappearance?
In this electrifying novel Gillian White lays bare the horrors that can arise from the manipulation of the media - when ordinary people's lives are transformed into the stuff of tragedy.
