Martina Cole is Britain's bestselling author of fourteen novels set in London's gangland, and her most recent three paperbacks have gone straight to No. 1 in the Sunday Times on first publication. Total sales of Martina's novels stand at over eight million copies. Cole was born in Essex, England, to Irish Catholic parents, and was the youngest of five children. Her mother was a psychiatric nurse from Glasnevin, County Dublin and her father was a merchant seaman from Cork City. Her cousin is Cork politician Denis Cregan. She was expelled from her convent school aged 15 after allegedly being caught reading a Harold Robbins novel. She married for the first time aged 16, but the marriage only lasted a year. She had her first child, Christopher, at the age of 18. Her parents both died when she was in her early 20s. Prior to her literary success, Cole had a variety of low-paid jobs, including working as a cleaner, a wine waitress, an agency nurse and a supermarket shelf-stacker. In The Runaway, a very disturbing but highly compelling and exciting story of two runaway children, Cathy Connor and Eamonn Docherty who leave home, become forced into care, abscond from the children's home and become drawn into the worlds of underage prostitution and London's gangland respectively. As the years go by, both children grow up in their illegal professions, gaining their reputations, and their paths will cross once again with terrifying consequences… You can listen online to free English audiobook “The Runaway” by Martina Cole on our website.
