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  3. Looked After: A moving, honest memoir about growing up in the British care system
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Imprint

  • Hodder Paperbacks
  • Hodder & Stoughton
  • Hodder & Stoughton
  • Hodder & Stoughton

  • Runtime

    10hr 0m

Looked After: A moving, honest memoir about growing up in the British care system

Ashley John-Baptiste

5 Reviews

Rated 0

Memoirs, Prose: non-fiction, Adoption & fostering, Adoption

A moving memoir from award-winning journalist and presenter Ashley John-Baptiste about his childhood growing up in care.

Ashley John-Baptiste grew up in the British care system, living with five different families during that time without ever being truly part of a family.

It wasn't easy, or straightforward, and Ashley's ever-changing living situation affected every single part of his life - from his education to his sense of identity to his friendships and his hobbies. And yet, throughout everything his childhood in care threw at him, Ashley remained resilient and found a way to take advantage of the opportunities that came his way.

Now Ashley feels able to tell us - vividly and movingly - how, when it felt like the world was turning its back on him, he refused to be an outsider in his own home and set about establishing a new and positive life for himself.

Looked After is a memoir written from the heart that pulls no punches but demonstrates that given encouragement and love - and, sometimes, a second chance - a care-experienced boy can become a successful broadcaster, a loving husband and a proud father.

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Praise for Looked After: A moving, honest memoir about growing up in the British care system

  • An inspiring story of triumph over adversity. - Fatima Whitbread

  • Ashley John Baptiste joins a high class of writing by upstanding respectful and honourable citizens and professionals, professors and actors, lawyers, doctors, artists and authors, all who happen to have had a life in care. We have every right to tell our story as much as anyone else. Welcome, Ashley. - Lemn Sissay

  • Ashley has done the country a great service in shining a light on the inhumane - and at times brutal - way that society supports this most vulnerable group of children. Every politician should read this book and commit to fixing the system. - Sharon White

  • This is a book that everyone must read. No matter how you grew up it's for you: it'll make you rethink your own childhood and your relationships with everyone you know. It's funny, moving and of course it's often sad. But mainly it's a beautiful and fascinating and enlightening portrait of the care system, a world that is barely understood by many of us. It is also a proper page turner: the twists and turns and set-backs of his childhood are as gripping as they are shocking. I genuinely couldn't put it down. This story is more urgent and relevant now than ever. - Xand van Tulleken

  • Beautifully written, with such immediacy, clarity and warmth - Eamon McCrory, Professor of Developmental Neuroscience and Psychopathology at UCL

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