The Convent: THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER: A shocking true story of surviving the care home from hell

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Marie was taken from her family despite having parents , and placed into this Catholic nun-led orphanage for over 3 years. THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER When a fancy car pulls up outside six-year-old Marie's home in Oldham, in 1959, she is told she is going on holiday. What child can remember all the details that this little girl did particularly after such a long time? Her cigarette lighter, a gift from her husband, is missing and she sees it on her father's mantlepiece. There is no explanation for why the nun had such an extreme hatred directed at this one girl, seemingly from the minute she walked in.

Thinking they were going on a holiday because their father said that's where they were going that day of August 1959. They were most likely too just frightened, lonely, manipulated (like she later says about them) children. She says: 'One day, a car came to collect me and my brother, Fred, and it was the first time I had ever been in a car, so I was really thrilled. She was one of 10 children (I think 7 at the time she was sent away) of extremely poor parents who could only afford a single bed for them all to sleep in, yet she had a baby every year. A big car pulls up outside they're house and off they go, watching with excitement as they pass into the countryside, they pull onto a large gravel drive not knowing that it is a convent and beyond those doors are depravity, cruelty assault and abuse not only by the other children but also the nuns as well.

I am furious and disgusted that so many children have suffered under the Catholic Church and it’s always covered up! This book takes us through Marie’s life of poverty and being sent away to live in a convent for three years of her childhood, the scars of this time never leaving her. She’s sent away with her elder brother, under the disguise of a holiday, to a convent due to her family’s poverty, unbeknownst to her, where she suffers evils under the control of a nun - Sister Isobel O’Brien.

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A spokesman for AO Advocates, solicitors handling Marie's case, said: 'Stories like Marie's are far too common. She says: 'The sexual abuse started in bed, the 12- and 13-year olds would get into bed with me and tell me: "This is what happens with boys". It took me until my 30s when my grandmother, and two years later, both said apropos of nothing I can remember that my mother didn't love me. Marie now hopes to file a claim in the civil courts, but needs compelling evidence from other victims to overturn the statute of limitations, which restricts claims over child abuse until the victim has turned 21.

Marie says: 'I adored my children, above anything else I wanted to make sure they felt loved and safe; something I had never had as a child. Sister O'Brien was supposed to be her surrogate mother to Marie, who was then named Kibblewhite, but instead, according to Marie, she had a taste for cruelty and violence.In 1958, when she turned five, her mother gave birth to Kathleen, her seventh baby – that’s when life got even harder. Marie tells the story of how she was taken away from a poor, but happy and loving home life, to live in a convent - away from everyone and everything she holds dear. Nearly 60 years later, she found the courage to come clean about the abuse she suffered at the hands of the nuns. It pulled at my heart strings to read the horrific, unthinkable things that little Marie and many more children in this convent went through and how they were treated. The mental suffering has stayed with me through my whole life, but was nothing compared with what this child endured.