Felicity's earliest memories are of pain and confusion, of being beaten daily by her nan and watching her mum being beaten too. She ran away from home at fifteen. At thirty-six she was a single mother of three sons who was broke and lost. Remarkably she turned her life around, becoming a teacher. But it wasn't quite enough . . .

Felicity needed to understand why her nan abused her - and in researching her family history uncovered a corrosive secret that had scarred succeeding generations. In 1903 her great-grandmother Emily Swann was hung for the murder of her violent husband. The Wombwell Murder was a notorious case, and it brought shame on Emily's orphaned children. Discovering the povery and hardships of Emily's life in Barnsley, and the traumas her nan suffered as a girl, Felicity came to see the destructive patterns that had been repeated in her family for nearly 100 years, and was finally free to walk away into her own future.