Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs

Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape

Jenna Miscavige Hill, Lisa Pulitzer · 416 pages

Jenna Miscavige Hill was raised to obey. As the niece of the Church of Scientology's leader David Miscavige, she grew up at the center of this highly controversial and powerful organization. But at twenty-one, Jenna made a daring break, risking everything she had ever known and loved to leave Scientology once and for all. Now she speaks out about her life, the Church, and her dramatic escape, goin

A Stolen Life

Jaycee Dugard · 273 pages

In the summer of 1991 I was a normal kid. I did normal things. I had friends and a mother who loved me. I was just like you. Until the day my life was stolen. For eighteen years I was a prisoner. I was an object for someone to use and abuse. For eighteen years I was not allowed to speak my own name. I became a mother and was forced to be a sister. For eighteen years I survived an impossible

The Color Purple

Alice Walker · 274 pages

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula

Escape

Carolyn Jessop, Laura Palmer · 426 pages

The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman's courageous flight to freedom with her eight children.When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral par

The Liars' Club

Mary Karr · 320 pages

The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Jeanette Winterson · 240 pages

Memories of the author about her difficult childhood as the adopted daughter of an English mother with strong religious convictions, and her subsequent search for her biological mother.

Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

Flora Rheta Schreiber · 460 pages

This is the amazing story of a woman who lived with 16 different personalities. Here is the unbelievable yet true story of Sybil Dorsett, a survivor of terrible childhood abuse who as an adult was a victim of sudden and mysterious blackouts. What happened during those blackouts has made Sybil's experience one of the most famous psychological cases in the world.

Broken

Shy Keenan · 305 pages

Shy Keenan co-founded Phoenix Survivors to campaign for justice for victims of sexual abuse and to rescue children at risk. As a child, she was beaten by her mother and raped by her stepfather and his associates. This is her memoir.

My Story

Elizabeth Smart, Chris Stewart · 308 pages

"For the first time, ten years after her abduction from her Salt Lake City bedroom, Elizabeth Smart reveals how she survived and the secret to forging a new life in the wake of a brutal crime On June 5, 2002, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart, the daughter of a close-knit Mormon family, was taken from her home in the middle of the night by religious fanatic, Brian David Mitchell and his wife, Wand

Not Without My Sister

Kristina Jones, Celeste Jones, Juliana Buhring · 432 pages

The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls · 296 pages

A story about the early life of Jeannette Walls. The memoir is an exposing work about her early life and growing up on the run and often homeless. It presents a different perspective of life from all over the United States and the struggle a girl had to find normalcy as she grew into an adult.

The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

Stephanie Oakes · 406 pages

The Kevinian Cult has taken everything from seventeen-year-old Minnow: twelve years of her life, her family, her ability to trust. And when she rebelled, they took away her hands, too. Now their Prophet has been murdered and their camp set aflame, and it's clear that Minnow knows something about what happened that night. As she languishes in juvenile detention, she relives the events that led to

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Harriet Jacobs · 228 pages

The true story of an individual's struggle for self-identity, self-preservation, and freedom, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl remains among the few extant slave narratives written by a woman. This autobiographical account chronicles the remarkable odyssey of Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) whose dauntless spirit and faith carried her from a life of servitude and degradation in North Carolina to l

Identical

Ellen Hopkins · 624 pages

Do twins begin in the womb? Or in a better place? Kaeleigh and Raeanne are identical down to the dimple. As daughters of a district-court judge father and a politician mother, they are an all-American family—on the surface. Behind the facade each sister has her own dark secret, and that's where their differences begin. For Kaeleigh, she's the misplaced focus of Daddy's love, intended for a

Losing Hope

Colleen Hoover · 380 pages

"In Hopeless, Sky left no secret unearthed, no feeling unshared and no memory forgotten, but Holder's past remains a mystery. He is haunted by the little girl he let walk away from him and he has spent his entire life searching for her. He had hoped that he would finally gain closure and be able to rid himself of his guilt the moment they were reconnected. But he could not have anticipated that th

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini · 416 pages

After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today. Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an

Good Morning, Monster

Catherine Gildiner · 368 pages

As seen on Good Morning America's SEPTEMBER 2020 READING LIST and FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2020!"We need to read stories about folks who have been through hell and kept going... Fascinating." —Glennon Doyle, A Favorite Book of 2020 on Good Morning America"Gildiner is nothing short of masterful—as both a therapist and writer. In these pages, she has gorgeously captured both the privilege of being given ac

The Woman in Me

Britney Spears · 288 pages

Tiger, Tiger

Margaux Fragoso · 322 pages

Fragoso's gut-wrenching memoir of sexual abuse--unflinchingly yet exquisitely rendered as she experienced them. One summer day, Margaux Fragoso meets Peter Curran at the neighborhood swimming pool, and they begin to play. She is seven; he is fifty-one. When Peter invites her and her mother to his house, the little girl finds a child's paradise. Her mother, beset by mental illness and overwhelmed

The Sound of Gravel

Ruth Wariner · 352 pages

The true story of one girl's coming-of-age in a polygamist family. Ruth Wariner was the thirty-ninth of her father's forty-two children. Growing up on a farm in rural Mexico, where authorities turn a blind eye to the practices of her community, Ruth lives in a ramshackle house without indoor plumbing or electricity. At church, preachers teach that God will punish the wicked by destroying the world

A Man Named Dave

Dave Pelzer · 339 pages

From the Publisher: "All those years you tried your best to break me, and I'm still here. One day you'll see, I'm going to make something of myself." These words were Dave Pelzer's declaration of independence to his mother, and they represented the ultimate act of self-reliance. Dave's father never intervened as his mother abused him with shocking brutality. But even after he was rescued, his lif

Redemption: A Story of Sisterhood, Survival, and Finding Freedom Behind Bars

Stacey Lannert · 318 pages

As her parent's marriage crumbles, Stacey finds comfort in her loving father, Tom. Until, at age eight, Tom initiates Stacey to a game they must keep between themselves. For the next ten years, Stacey's life is ripped apart by physical and sexual abuse. Feeling hopeless, she takes matters into her own hands by ending the life of her abuser. Redemption takes a dark, disturbing look into a life dest

Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice

Virginia Roberts Giuffre · 402 pages

**The unforgettable memoir by the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the woman who dared to take on Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell** The world knows Virginia Roberts Giuffre as Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s most outspoken victim: the woman whose decision to speak out helped send both serial abusers to prison, whose photograph with Prince Andrew catalyzed his fall from grace. But he

Sharp Objects

Gillian Flynn · 297 pages

WICKED above her hipbone, GIRL across her heart Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker's troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille's first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls.NASTY on her kneecap, BABYDOLL on her legSince she left town eight years a