Rachael McGill: Fair Trade Heroin

The latest addition to my website is Rachael McGill‘s Fair Trade Heroin. Gwen is an aid worker in Afghanistan in the 1990s, just as the Taliban are taking over. While other aid agencies are moving out, Gwen wants to help the people of a village and, in particular, the women, by offering them alternative employment to the opium poppy trade. As the Taliban move in and she tries to set up a handicrafts school and then a way for them to sell their opium by cutting the middlemen, i.e. the drug warlords. Things do not go well when the Taliban march in and Gwen is dragged out of the country and to safety by Roshan, who works for her aid agency, but not before a quick fling with Syed, one of the drug dealers. Back in the UK, sixteen years later, Nadia, the result of her fling, is now fifteen and mother and daughter clash. When Gwen, working for a charity that helps immigrants, learns that Roshan is in the UK (illegally) and is involved in a drug deal gone wrong, inadvertently witnessed by Nadia, can she help?

Leave a Reply