The Ballymara Road: 3 (The Four Streets)

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The world in which they now find themselves is complicated and hierarchical, with rules that must be obeyed.

While Labour’s Dawn Butler queried on Twitter how Dorries has time to be an author, given that she’s an MP, the new culture secretary is showing no signs of slowing down. There are many who can legitimately claim to have helped defenestrate our former prime minister — the BBC, Sky, ITV, the entire Remain establishment, and many of Boris’s own MPs, just for a start. But Miss Van Gilder harbors a dark and dishonest secret, and the staff—who are used to looking after their own—set out to uncover it. Men knock back the Guinness (28 mentions in The Four Streets, Dorries’ first book), while they dream of “green fields the colour of emeralds, or a raven-haired girl, with eyes that shone like diamonds”, and kick each other’s heads in.

At the time, I thought it was a cathartic process, my way of processing something I could not talk about. There they sat, draped in their vestments of authority and trust, and looked down at their hands clasped on their knees as I spoke. But when an unknown girl is admitted, after a botched late abortion in a backstreet kitchen, a tragedy begins to unfold which will rock the world of St Angelus to its foundations.

I outlined what had happened to me and what I knew to be strong evidence that the priest had abused others. The books received some attention and I plucked up the courage to make a complaint to Lambeth Palace.The life of St Angelus is soon disrupted as her proposals turn the running of the hospital upside down and threaten the jobs of the domestics and porters. Dorries was signed up as an author in 2013 in a six-figure deal, shortly before she was forced to apologise to MPs for failing to declare her fee for appearing on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! Five very different girls are arriving at the nurses' home in Lovely Lane, Liverpool, to start their training at St Angelus Hospital. The books Dorries is writing – which Wallace didn’t go so far as to claim he’d read – fall squarely into the saga market, which is known, rather dismissively, as the “clogs and shawls” genre, and which feature misery, poverty and abuse followed by a happy ending, set at some point in the past. MAFS UK viewers SHOCKED after Thomas and Roz engage in X-rated shenanigans during group dinner party: 'He's turned into Mr Grey!

Publication date 2015 Topics Adopted children -- Fiction, Sick children -- Fiction, Intercountry adoption -- Fiction, Adopted children, Intercountry adoption, Sick children, Social conditions, Galway (Ireland) -- Social conditions -- 20th century -- Fiction, Liverpool (England) -- Social conditions -- 20th century -- Fiction, Chicago (Ill. Nadine Dorries has the ability to describe stark cruelty without flinching, yet you feel her compassion, you also feel her connection and admiration for the people of the Four Streets. There are a lot of characters within the book, especially as it takes place in Liverpool, Ireland and Chicago, and I did find myself feeling a bit overwhelmed to begin with. She knows her beautiful baby boy presents a huge danger to her family's Catholic community back in Liverpool's Four Streets.

Not since Jeffrey Archer burst on to the scene has a celebrity MP produced such a commercial first novel. According to defence secretary Ben Wallace, speaking on Sky News, Dorries is qualified to be culture secretary because she is a bestselling author. Michael Malone's choice will have fateful consequences for everyone – especially, in due course, for his young daughter. Amid the hardship and poverty of 1950s Liverpool, only the humor and community spirit of nurses and patients will get the Angels through their toughest Christmas yet.