‘Astonishing… A fascinating and obsessively close look at one of the great rags-to-riches stories of our time.’ Sunday Express From working-class dreamer on the cobbled streets of Yorkshire to one of the world's most successful authors on the sweeping avenues of Manhattan, the rise of Barbara Taylor Bradford is by any standard extraordinary. In this incredible story of suffering, loss and triumph over adversity, fact and fiction proceed side by side in a unique collaboration, the first time that Taylor Bradford has participated in a memoir of any kind, and one that has turned out to be as much a revelation to her as it will certainly be to her readers. ‘A woman of Real substance: the amazing story of how Barbara Taylor Bradford discovered she was the secret grandchild of a philandering aristocrat.’ The Mail on Sunday ‘Enthralling – a story no less gripping than any of her blockbusters.’ You Magazine ‘Dudgeon is a fine writer with a dogged determination to find out what makes his subject tick.’ The Glasgow Herald About the Author Piers Dudgeon is a publisher and the author of more than thirty books of non-fiction. He worked for ten years as an editor in London before starting his own company, publishing authors as diverse as Daphne du Maurier, John Fowles, Peter Ackroyd, Ted Hughes, Giovanni Guareschi, Angus Stewart and Susan Hill, and writing a number of books celebrating the spirit of place, including Dickens’ London: An Imaginative Vision , The Spirit of Britain: A Guide to Literary Britain and The Country Child:Intimations of Immortality . In 1993 he left London for Yorkshire, where he wrote biographies of Catherine Cookson, Maeve Binchy, Barbara Taylor Bradford, J M Barrie and the Du Maurier family, the lateral thinker Edward de Bono and the composer Sir John Tavener, as well as a series of oral histories of Glasgow, Liverpool and London’s East End, and the annual Virgin Alternative Guide to British Universities .