Unbeaten

For Kim Woodburn finding fame in her 60s in the smash hit television series How Clean is Your House? with fellow dust-buster Aggie Mackenzie was like living a fairytale.

Often she simply wished that she had never been born. For Kim overcame horrific emotional and physical abuse both at the hands of her alcoholic mother and her philandering, sexually abusive father.

In her brave and revealing story Kim's memories of growing up were not of love and cuddles, but of beatings and random cruelty. Shuttled between the brutal houses of her warring parents, a succession of miserable children's homes and a grim convent - Kim's past cast a long shadow over her life. But just before her sixteenth birthday she finally made her escape. It took decades of hard work, and a wonderfully happy marriage to conquer depression but now she emerged unbowed and unbeaten as Britain's Queen of Clean, and went on to win the heart of the Nation.

A woman like no other, with a story like no other: this is a powerful testament to one woman's will to survive.