Emily Gunnis

The Girl in the Letter transplants the Magdalene laundry model to a Sussex convent where unmarried mothers were held and their babies taken, and sends a journalist after a fifty-year-old letter to find out what happened there. Gunnis is one of Penny Vincenzi's daughters and worked in television before writing. The institutional history underneath the novel is real, and the book is careful to mark which parts of it are documented and which are invented.