The witch's cradle - Gillian White

Barry and Cheryl were famous. Desperately poor, living in a tower block with their children, they were possibly the most famous family in the country. Their fame came not from wealth or success or glamour, but from the attentions of a television company, who had made them the subject of a fly-on-the-wall documentary.

Cheryl was prepared to do anything to be a media star. She thought that the public loved her - and, indeed, for a while it seemed that the nation had taken this gutsy, poverty-stricken couple to its heart. But then it all starts to go horribly wrong. Her three children go missing. Have they been abducted? Murdered? Or is there some even more sinister explanation?

In this electrifying novel Gillian White lays bare the horrors which can arise from the manipulation of the media - when ordinary people's lives are tranformed into the stuff of tragedy.