The Amazingly Astonishing Story is Lucy Gannon's memoir of her first seventeen years. The daughter of a soldier, she lived a peripatetic early life but settled in the north west. Here, a young child, she suffered the death of her mother and was cared for by an aunt. Escape beckoned when her father remarried and the family moved south, but Lucy and her two elder brothers soon find out that they have swapped one difficult situation for another...