Next time you get your nails done, look at the person doing them. Really look. Not at the work. At them. Do they seem happy? Do they speak much English? Did they choose to be there?
I am not saying they didn't. Many nail technicians in this country are skilled workers doing a legitimate job. But some are not. Some were promised a job in a salon, paid a smuggler they will spend years repaying, and arrived in Britain to find the job was real but the freedom was not. They work. They do not get paid. They do not leave. One of the chapters in The Other Lotus Girl is called "Beautiful Nails." Mrs Patterson is having her nails and hair done, unaware of the horrors the girls who were doing it had been through.
In 2024, the UK's National Referral Mechanism recorded 19,125 potential victims of modern slavery. The highest figure since records began. Vietnamese nationals accounted for 2,153 of those, a 117% increase on the previous year. These are the ones we know about. Nail bars. Cannabis farms. Sexual exploitation. It's happening in ordinary towns on ordinary streets, and most people walk past it without knowing.
I know this because I spent a long time researching it. My wife is Vietnamese. She was not trafficked and does not know anyone who was, but she understands it happens from her birth country and is horrified by it. She helped me understand Vietnamese culture and make the characters feel real. It also added something personal to the story, knowing it was also important to my wife to get it right.
When I sat down to write The Other Lotus Girl, I wanted to get it right. Not sensationalised. Not graphic. Not reduced to a headline or a statistic. I wanted the reader's brain to do the work, because that is where the real horror lives. Not on the page. In the gaps between what is said and what is understood.
I knew I was taking a risk. It was only my second novel, and I chose a dual timeline about one of the most difficult subjects you can write about. The past chapters follow Vân, a Vietnamese woman trafficked across Europe. They are dark. They are supposed to be. But I also knew that if the entire book was darkness, fewer people would finish it. Fewer people would pick it up in the first place. So the present-day chapters are something different. They are human.
Stuart is an ordinary man in Guildford who was going out for Earl Grey when a terrified woman threw herself into his car. His husband Martin is trying to hold things together. Mrs Patterson is seventy-three, sharp-tongued, and carrying her own ghosts. John is well-meaning but out of his depth. These are real people living real ordinary lives, people who have been through their own trauma but who also know that whatever they have faced is nothing compared to what Vân has been through. They do not all agree about immigration. John hints at the idea that people come here to take advantage. Mrs Patterson has her own views. But when they are faced with this girl, this actual person in front of them, the politics fall away and what is left is simpler than that. This is wrong. She needs help. We are the only ones here.
I worried about the tone. I worried that mixing dry British humour with the horrors of Vân's story would not work for some people. And it did not, for some. One reviewer called it a "slapstick chase scene," which stung, because it's not slapstick. It's British people dealing with fear the way British people deal with fear, which is badly, and with tea, and arguments about directions. But I took the risk because I believed that if it did work, more people would be able to read it. More people would stay with Vân's story. More people would understand that this is real and it does happen, not in some far-off country but here, on streets that look exactly like theirs. So far this has been the case overall.
I am not saying every Vietnamese girl in a nail bar has been trafficked. I am not saying everyone who comes here has been tricked or forced. Some do choose to come. This is not a pro-immigration story or an anti-immigration story. It is a story about the ones who are forced. The ones who are tricked. The ones who do not understand what they are being brought into. And it is a reminder that we can sometimes too easily judge that people have come here just to take advantage, when we have no idea what their life has been. Not all lives are lived the same.
That is what fiction can do that statistics cannot. A novel can put you inside a locked room without describing every bruise. It can sit you in a stranger's car at eleven o'clock at night with a woman who does not speak perfect English, who is shaking, who is begging you to drive, and let you feel completely out of your depth. Because, of course, you would be. Most people would. And that feeling, that helpless "what do I do now," is more powerful than any graph or government report.
There are not enough books about this subject. Most recommendation lists are dominated by nonfiction, memoirs, and academic texts. The fiction that does exist is often young adult or set in countries far enough away that British readers can keep it at arm's length. So here are eight books about human trafficking, including my own, that take the subject seriously. Some approach it head-on. Others come at it sideways. All of them treat their characters as people first and victims second, which is the only way to do it honestly.
The Other Lotus Girl by Daniel A. Riddle (2024)
This is my book, so take it with whatever grain of salt you think it deserves.
Vân is promised a job in a nail salon. Instead, she spends twenty months transported across Europe, sold in warehouses, hidden in basements. When she escapes her handler in Guildford and throws herself into Stuart Henderson's car, Stuart, his husband Martin, their eccentric neighbour John, and a sharp-tongued seventy-three-year-old called Barbara Patterson become the only people standing between her and the men who want her back. They are outmatched, unarmed, and driving a battered Nissan Micra.
It has a five-star Readers' Favourite review, is a 2026 Wishing Shelf Book Awards finalist, and exists as a free full-cast audio drama on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube. If you are not sure whether my writing is for you, press play on Episode 1. It costs you nothing.
Everything else about this story I've said above.
Sold by Patricia McCormick (2006)
The one most people encounter first. Thirteen-year-old Lakshmi is sold from Nepal into a Mumbai brothel by her stepfather. Written in spare, devastating free verse, it was a National Book Award finalist. McCormick travelled to India and interviewed survivors in Kolkata's red-light district. It is classified as young adult fiction but do not let that put you off. The restraint is what makes it work. McCormick trusts the reader to fill in what she leaves unsaid, and your brain does, and it is worse than anything she could have written explicitly.
Emma Thompson executive-produced the 2014 film adaptation, which starred Gillian Anderson. Thompson has spent nearly two decades campaigning against trafficking. She co-created "The Journey," an installation in Trafalgar Square that used shipping containers to walk people through a victim's experience. She served as President of the Helen Bamber Foundation, which provides therapeutic care for trafficking survivors. Anderson, a patron of Childreach International, has called combating child sex trafficking her number one advocacy priority. They are two of the few public figures who have stayed with this cause rather than moving on to the next one.
Purge by Sofi Oksanen (2008)
The most decorated novel on this list. Set in 1992 Estonia, elderly Aliide Truu finds Zara, a young woman fleeing Russian mafia sex traffickers, collapsed in her garden. Their connection runs through decades of Soviet-era betrayal, forced silence, and complicity. Winner of the Finlandia Prize, the Prix Femina, and the European Book Prize. Oksanen is Finnish-Estonian and the weight of that heritage is in every page. It does not flinch, but it earns every difficult scene rather than exploiting them. That distinction matters.
A Walk Across the Sun by Corban Addison (2012)
After the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami orphans two sisters in Chennai, they are trafficked into a Mumbai brothel, then separated. One is forced into sex work. The other becomes a drug mule sent to Paris and the United States. Addison is a lawyer who volunteered with International Justice Mission and visited Indian brothels for his research. John Grisham endorsed it, his first ever novel endorsement. The sisters' storyline is the heart of the book. The parallel American plotline is more formulaic, but Addison did something important: he brought trafficking fiction to a mainstream thriller audience that might never have encountered it otherwise. Sometimes reaching more people matters more than literary purity. I understand that instinct.
The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré (2020)
This one matters because it reframes what trafficking looks like. Fourteen-year-old Adunni in rural Nigeria is sold as a third wife, then becomes an unpaid domestic slave for a wealthy Lagos family. Written in a striking invented voice, it won the Bath Novel Award and was a Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month. When people think of trafficking they think of brothels and shipping containers. This book reminds you it also happens in kitchens, behind closed doors, in houses with nice gardens. Forced marriage and domestic servitude are forms of trafficking that rarely get discussed in the same breath as sexual exploitation. They should be.
Dead Tomorrow by Peter James (2009)
The British crime fiction entry. Detective Superintendent Roy Grace investigates bodies pulled from the sea off Sussex with organs removed, uncovering a Romanian trafficking ring bringing Eastern European children to the UK. Part of the Roy Grace series, which has sold over 18 million copies and was adapted as ITV's Grace. It is probably the most prominent British crime novel to directly tackle trafficking. Set in Brighton, which grounds it in a recognisable, ordinary place. That matters. It is easier to care about something when it is happening somewhere you have been.
The Cellar by Minette Walters (2015)
A razor-sharp novella about domestic slavery in London. Fourteen-year-old Muna, taken from a West African orphanage at eight, is kept in a cellar by the family who brought her to England. Beaten, exploited, hidden. At under 200 pages, it is a gut-punch. Walters does something clever: she gives the victim terrifying agency. It subverts expectations about who holds the power. And it exposes how trafficking hides behind closed doors on streets that look perfectly normal from the outside.
The Lookback Window by Kyle Dillon Hertz (2023)
The second most recent and most boundary-pushing title on this list. Dylan, a gay man in Brooklyn, was sex-trafficked as a teenager by a man who groomed him with promises of love. New York's Child Victims Act opens a one-year window for him to pursue legal action. Hertz is himself a trafficking survivor. The book is raw and unflinching and provides something rare in trafficking fiction: a male victim's perspective. It closes this list on the note that trafficking has no single face.
Why this matters
Eight books. UK, Vietnam, Nepal, Estonia, India, Nigeria, the United States. Sex trafficking, domestic slavery, labour exploitation, organ harvesting, criminal exploitation. If there is a common thread, it is this: the best fiction about human trafficking does not reduce victims to statistics or plot devices. It gives them interiority. It lets you see through their eyes. And once you have done that, you do not unsee it.
Not all lives are lived the same. Sometimes it takes a novel to remind you of that. So the next time you get your nails done, just ask how they are. It doesn't hurt, and you never know it might just help someone speak out.
If you want to do something beyond reading, these organisations are doing the work:
Anti-Slavery International — The world's oldest human rights organisation, founded in 1839. Based in London. They have led research specifically into Vietnamese trafficking to the UK. https://www.antislavery.org/
Unseen — Runs the UK Modern Slavery & Exploitation Helpline: 08000 121 700 (24/7, over 200 languages). https://www.unseenuk.org/
The Salvation Army — Holds the UK Government's Modern Slavery Victim Care Contract for England and Wales. Referral helpline: 0800 808 3733. https://www.salvationarmy.org.uk/modern-slavery
ECPAT UK — Focused specifically on child trafficking. They work with vulnerable Vietnamese children in the UK. https://www.ecpat.org.uk/
Hope for Justice — Founded in Birmingham. Worked with West Midlands Police on the largest modern slavery prosecution in UK history. https://hopeforjustice.org/
Helen Bamber Foundation — Provides therapeutic care and legal protection for trafficking survivors. Emma Thompson served as President. https://www.helenbamber.org/
Childreach International — Works to protect vulnerable children worldwide. Gillian Anderson is a patron. https://www.childreach.org.uk/
If you suspect someone is being trafficked or exploited, call the Modern Slavery Helpline: 08000 121 700. It is free, confidential, and available 24 hours a day.