Hope's Boy: Broken by life, saved by love

A devastatingly moving memoir of a lost childhood with a schizophrenic mother and in a bizarre foster home.

Andrew grew up in the 1970s with his funny, loving but deeply unstable mother. Life with her was totally chaotic. She left him alone in motel rooms at night and took him with her when she went house burgling. But Andrew's mother wasn't bad, she was just lost herself and one thing she did was always tell him she loved him.

Gradually, though, the bad times got worse. One day Andrew, aged seven, found his mother in the bathroom in the middle of a breakdown, the walls covered in her pleas for help all written in the blood from the cuts she'd inflicted on herself. He was taken into care and put with a foster family who treated him with loneliness and neglect at best and cruel indifference as standard.

This is a groundbreaking story of a childhood destroyed by mental illness. It is also a heartbreaking love story about a mother's legacy of love.