Women Survival Stories

Why Women Grow is a much-needed exploration of why women turn to the earth, as gardeners, growers and custodians. This book emerged from a deeply rooted desire to share the stories of women who are silenced and overlooked. In doing so, Alice fosters connections with gardeners that unfurl into a tender exploration of women's lives, their gardens and what the ground has offered them, with conversations spanning creation and loss, celebration and grief, power, protest, identity and renaissance.

The shocking first true account from one of the young girls who lived through and survived the Rotherham sex abuse scandal. In the summer of 2014, the Rotherham sex abuse scandal sent shockwaves through the nation. A report revealed that since the 1990s, up to 1,400 young girls in the town had been regularly abused by sex gangs, predominantly comprised of Pakistani men.

She came to America for a dream. Instead, she was sold into a nightmare. Anika Coltrane arrives on American soil expecting a future of hope as a mail-order bride. Instead, she wakes up drugged, caged, and betrayed—caught in a ruthless trafficking ring. But Anika won’t go quietly. She refuses to abandon the other girls and vows to escape—no matter the cost. U.S. Marshal Chase Rivers has seen too much death to believe in hope. Haunted by war and hollowed out by loss, Chase lives for duty and little else—until he crosses paths with a fierce survivor who shakes something loose in his ...

Once in your life you will read, see, or hear something that truly affects you. Maybe it's something that happened to you or someone you know. Maybe you can relate to it. Suddenly, you feel compelled to tell others about it. You become the heroine, the survivor, and feel an enormous amount of pride in yourself. You want to share your story now. For you have overcome the shame, the stereotypes, and are reborn into a new world: a world of understanding and hope. This is a story of a survivor: a survivor of emotional, physical and sexual abuse. This is the story of a woman who overcame the ...

Myra says, "This is a book about how to overcome life's worst tragedies and your own dumb-ass decisions." It was the scandal that rocked the world of music and destroyed a career. In 1958, rock-and-roll sensation Jerry Lee Lewis stepped off a plane in London to be greeted by a frenzy of fans. His entourage followed, including a teenaged girl. When a reporter asked how she knew the performer, she innocently gave an honest answer. “I’m his wife.” Within hours, headlines erupted with the shocking news that Jerry Lee had secretly married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Myra. The scandal ...

Welcome to the 2nd installment of the Superwoman Survival Stories, where we share our journeys to wholeness and tell our stories of trauma to triumph during the Covid pandemic and beyond.

A teenage girl, guilty only of being Jewish, is saved from the fate that awaits her family and hidden by her parents' Catholic friends—who pay the ultimate price for their bravery. So much was risked and so much lost but the legacy of their courage and trust lives on through the surviving generations. Now, at last, their story can be told . . .

In 1943, German SS officers in charge of Auschwitz-Birkenau ordered that an orchestra should be formed among the female prisoners. Almost fifty women and girls from eleven nations were drafted into a hurriedly assembled band that would play marching music to other inmates, forced labourers who left each morning and returned, exhausted and often broken, at the end of the day.

On the morning of November 14, 1992, Annette Herfkens, a top Dutch banker, packed her luggage for a romantic getaway with her longtime fiancé, Willem. At 6:25 that morning, Annette and Willem boarded a plane out of Ho Chi Minh City, with 23 other passengers and six crew members, excited to finally have a vacation together. Six minutes before landing, flying at speed of 300 miles per hour, the plane lost altitude and crashed along a mountain ridge in the jungle of Vietnam.

Stolen life. Given fangs. Fate roars in midnight woods. I awoke reborn—a damsel turned wolf, with secrets lurking beneath every moonlit shadow. Blake, with eyes stormier than thunderclouds, had saved me—and himself. Alpha with a heart of stone and fire, driven by loss yet guided by instincts. The pack offered safety, but Blake's past cried for vengeance. His touch, forbidden and intoxicating, whispered promises of destiny. I, the once fragile human, now became his fiercest ally. Between blood vendettas and tangled loyalties, desire ignited a treacherous dance. Marcus entered—a rival ...

This is the true story of Yasmeena, a bright and beautiful young Lebanese woman who was imprisoned in Kuwait during the first Gulf War. Yasmeena's shocking journey is a tale of the madness of war, of the sexual brutality unleashed by chaos, and of one woman’s courage to stand in danger’s way to aid her fellow sufferers.

Ava Thomas knew leaving was the right decision. Trapped and manipulated in her relationship, and after yet another violent beating whilst she was pregnant, Ava was helped to a women's refuge with her children. Listening to the stories of other women there, Ava began thinking back to where it all started to go wrong. Brought up by a mother who never loved her, Ava sought that missing care and warmth elsewhere. Running away to her father's home as a teenager, she thought she might finally be safe. But after being abused by her own brother, she was thrown out onto the streets.

Sarah Forsyth has spent most of her life in fear. After overcoming the hurt and heartbreak of a horrific childhood, Sarah managed to build a new life for herself as a nursery nurse. Then, one day, she spotted a newspaper advert for a job in a crèche in Amsterdam. Excited by the prospect of a fresh start abroad, she eagerly signed up. But within minutes of stepping off the plane in Amsterdam her life began to fall apart.... There was no crèche and no job. That night, at just 19 years of age, her life - her real life, her life as Sarah Forsyth - ended.

On October 25, 2011, aid worker Jessica Buchanan was kidnapped at gunpoint and held for ransom by an organized band of Somali land pirates. For the next three months, Jessica was terrorized by more than two dozen gangsters. Every terrifying moment Jessica spent suffering in captivity was matched by that of her adoring husband working behind the scenes to deal with her captors. Finally, on January 25, 2012, President Barack Obama ordered a rescue operation by a team of 24 Navy SEALs. Impossible Odds is a harrowing and heart-wrenching memoir of Jessica's kidnapping, her three months in captivity, and her rescue by the Navy SEALs.

When Kat Ward put down her pen after finishing the seventh book in her “KERI” series, she considered her mission complete. Nearly twenty years had passed since her therapist originally recommend writing as a means of healing her childhood wounds. And after taking listeners on a stomach-twisting journey through her hellish formative years, she was ready to look in the mirror again.

In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off to run the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious and entrepreneurial expedition leader, a zoologist, and two amateur boatmen. With its churning waters and treacherous boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. Journalists and veteran river runners boldly proclaimed that the motley crew would never make it out alive. But for Clover and Jotter, the expedition held a tantalizing appeal: no one had yet surveyed the plant life of the Grand Canyon, and they were determined to be the first.

Author Sherry Rudd shares her personal story of struggling with Hyperemesis Gravidarum, a condition which affects less than two percent of pregnant women.

All her life, Katherine Keith has hungered for remote, wild places that fill her soul with freedom and peace. Her travels take her across America, but it is in the vast and rugged landscape of Alaska that she finds her true home. Alaska is known as a place where people disappear - at least a couple thousand go missing each year. But the same vast and rugged landscape that contributed to so many people being lost is precisely what has gotten her found.

Near the end of her life, Mary Mann Hamilton (1866-c.1936) was encouraged to record her experiences as a female pioneer. The result is the only known firsthand account of a remarkable woman thrust into the center of taming the American South - surviving floods, tornadoes, and fires; facing bears, panthers, and snakes; managing a boardinghouse in Arkansas that was home to an eccentric group of settlers; and running a logging camp in Mississippi that blazed a trail for development in the Mississippi Delta.

Captain Kidd was one of the most notorious pirates to ever prowl the seas. But few know that Kidd had an accomplice, a behind-the-scenes player who enabled his plundering and helped him outpace his enemies. That accomplice was his wife, Sarah Kidd, a well-to-do woman whose extraordinary life is a lesson in reinvention and resourcefulness. Twice widowed by twenty-one and operating within the strictures of polite society in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New York, Sarah secretly aided and abetted her husband, fighting alongside him against his accusers.