About

BIOGRAPHY

About Emily Gunnis

Hello lovely readers,

Thank you for checking out my website.

I've wanted to be an author since my mum, Penny Vincenzi, got her first book deal when I was 14. We'd spend hours walking and talking about the worlds her characters inhabited and unpicking any plot dead ends she'd found herself in. I absolutely loved it - this is what I wanted to do!

Fast forward 30 years and I've discovered it's a great deal harder than my mum made it look! But still, here I am.

After graduating in Journalism, Film and Broadcasting, I wrote scripts and had two episodes of BBC Doctors commissioned but didn't like all the input from Script Editors and Producers. So, while I worked in various PA jobs I decided to go for it and just kept learning as much as I could until I sold my debut novel, The Girl in the Letter, which came out in August 2018 and has sold nearly half a million copies worldwide and been translated into 17 languages.

The Girl in the Letter is a dual narrative, with two strong female characters at it’s heart; Ivy Jenkins, who in 1956, falls pregnant and is sent in disgrace to St Margaret’s, a dark, brooding house for unmarried mothers, where her baby is adopted against her will. And Samantha Harper, a journalist and single mother, who in 2017, finds the letters that Ivy wrote to her lover whilst at St Margarets - begging for him to come and rescue her, which he never does.

Sam is pulled into the tragic story and discovers a spate of unexplained deaths surrounding the woman and her child. With St Margaret’s set for demolition, Sam has only hours to piece together a sixty-year-old mystery, before the truth, which lies disturbingly close to home, is lost forever....

Whilst St Margaret’s is totally fictional, it is an amalgamation of lots of homes and stories I have read about in my research, and the workhouse conditions portrayed within it are, tragically, real. And whilst the Irish Magdalene stories have started to receive their rightful attention, most people are unaware that these institutions also existed in the UK. Young women were put under tremendous pressure by their parents or social workers into giving up their babies against their will. The experience traumatised many of the women to such a degree that they have suffered years of mental and/or physical ill health and many were unable to have more children.

I suspect no one has ever really been brought to account, and that provided the inspiration for The Girl in the Letter.

My follow up novel, The Lost Child, was published on 2nd April 2020 and is again inspired by a, mostly, unknown truth and terrible injustice towards women. I discovered it quite by accident after seeing an old black and white map of Chichester where the ‘County Lunatic Asylum’ building caught my attention. A few days afterwards, I went to visit the old site of Graylingwell Hospital with my mother in law, a retired police detective, who informed me that as divorce was hard to come by up until the 1950s, wealthy men were able to have their wives admitted to the asylum to make way for their mistresses. From that moment, The Lost Child was born!

The Lost Child is another dual narrative which tells the story of thirteen year old Rebecca who, aged just 13, witnesses her mother’s death and the hands of her father. But what else did Rebecca see? Years later, Rebecca’s daughter Iris and Jessie know their mother will never speak of that terrible night in the winter of 1960. But when Jessie goes missing, with her gravely ill newborn, Iris realises the past may hold the key to her sister’s disappearance.

I really hope you enjoy reading The Girl in the Letter and The Lost Child, as much as I enjoyed writing them. And my follow up novel, which I am writing at the moment and am totally hooked on! I’ll keep you posted on progress.....

I love to think of my novels as a roller coaster ride, during which you discover an injustice about recent history, which you weren’t previously aware of. I hope having an element of truth to my stories, adds to the goosebump factor!

I live in Sussex with my husband Steve and our two beautiful, very energetic girls, Grace and Eleanor. Grace wants to be a writer, and won a writing competition at school recently which I screamed very loudly about. And Ellie wants to be an artist and lives mostly in another world - so I guess they are both rather like me in that way!

Nothing makes me happier than hearing from my readers, so please get in touch via Twitter @EmilyGunnis, Instagram @emilygunnis and Facebook @emilygunnisauthor. I’d love to know what you think of the website, and what you would like to see more/less of.

Keep reading!

Love Emily x

Praise for Emily Gunnis

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