Helen is the best-selling author of The Improbable Adventures of Miss Emily Soldene, The Scarlet Sisters, Sisters of the East End and Confessions of a Showman. She is currently working on a book about a Princess and a murdering composer in Renaissance Naples.
Bringing back onto the stage the irrepressible Miss Soldene, music hall star, opera diva, producer, director and impresario, who toured the globe, tore up the rulebook, and scandalized Britain with her kiss and tell memoir.
The extraordinary story of the ultimate showman, his successes and calamities in the colourful world of the circus.
The Sunday Times best seller. The unique world of the nursing nuns behind Call the Midwife told through the life of the reluctant Sister Catherine Mary
The true story of five feisty red head sisters escaping poverty and finding love through two worlds wars.
‘Beautifully written, sensitive and thoughtful, Helen Batten’s Scarlet Sisters is a fascinating window into the early 20th century, End End world her flame-haired antecedents inhabited, As vivid as the sisters’
- Yours magazine
‘A moving, occasionally heartbreaking yet ultimately life-affirming account of the real-life nuns who worked as midwives in the East End of the 1950s’
- Yours magazine
'A romp of a memoir of the circus supremo, packed with tales of custard pies, cocaine addiction, errant clowns, crocodiles’ mouths, beautiful girls and elephant muck.' - The Bookseller
'If Josser is a minutely detailed evocation of the dirt and the drudgery and the toil of circus life, Confessions of a Showman, the autobiography of circus proprietor, former clown and 'ultimate chancer' Gerry Cottle, is a brisk and optimistic homage to the colour, the variety and the life of bigtop circus and showbiz.'
- Sideshow Circus Magazine
'Helen Batten set herself the task of delving into her Nanna’s fascinating past and the result is The Scarlet Sisters. The tale she uncovers, of five Feist redheads struggling through the war years together, is a moving account of survival.'
- Yours magazine
'she has captured his voice so that the narrative gallops along like a conversation with Cottle in a back-stage caravan.'
- The Telegraph
‘The Scarlet Sisters is a fascinating delve into family history, revealing the ways in which women’s lives have - and haven’t - changed’
- Readers Digest