Stranger Things actor Millie Bobby Brown’s debut novel, Nineteen Steps, revolves loosely around true events. In 1943, the Bethnal Green tube disaster claimed the lives of 173 Londoners, due to faulty stairs in the station used as an air raid shelter.
This tragedy, the UK’s largest loss of civilian life in the second world war, was one Brown’s own grandmother survived. Brown describes her novel as a “really special project” inspired by her family’s WWII history.
But she didn’t write Nineteen Steps. A ghostwriter named Kathleen McGurl did. McGurl described the process in a blog post:
