Megan Lloyd Davies

Against All Odds

by Angela Cannings & Megan Lloyd Davies

Hours after her third baby died of cot death, police and social services had taken over Angela Cannings' life. Under investigation for harming her children, she was separated from her surviving daughter and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2002 on the basis of flawed medical evidence. The following year her conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal and Angela was released. Yet now she faced another ordeal – the struggle to rebuild a normal family life with the husband and daughter she’d been separated from. A story of one mother's love, her courage and hope against the odds.

I'd written about Angela while working as a journalist but leaped at the chance to help tell her whole life story because she was the victim of the most horrifying miscarriage of justice of all – a mother wrongly convicted of murdering her children. Angela inspired me: she might have drowned when the system went against her but didn't. Instead she fought to get her conviction quashed and be reunited with her daughter – and in doing so ensured that other women who'd lost their children wouldn’t face the same legal horror she had.

Against All Odds was published in the UK by Little Brown. Translation rights sold in Sweden, Holland, Germany and Italy.