Sophie Morton-Thomas – Travel By Night

‘Travel by Night’ by Sophie Morton-Thomas is a horrific but compelling and emotional story of sex-trafficking. A story that doesn’t sit easily in your mind but one that is definitely told with honesty and compassion. The author grips you by the throat almost right from the word go. The beginning of this book is a frightening and rough one, you would be forgiven for feeling confused, that is the aim.

The reader is immediately thrown into our main characters, Yalina’s world. She has woken in hospital after an operation as confused as us, the reader.

Yalina decides to meet her brother to re-connect. She ends up being tricked into becoming a sex-slave and taken to a house with other girls there. Yalina is trapped but finds hope in the fact that one girl has got away and while she waits she discovers a piano and finds her love for music. This becomes her only salvation along with the friendships she begins to make amongst the women and she takes a young girl, Rebecca under her wing. Will Yalina ever escape this desolate, desperate life she has been tricked into or not?

Sophie Morton-Thomas shows us a horrible picture of how these poor women live. They are made to work in nail bars and food factories in the day and prostitutes at night. This certainly opens our minds to the realism of this book. How many women are sex-trafficked into the U.K and made to live like this? She shows us how manipulated the women and girls are, mentally and physically.

How easy it is to have a twisted vision and thoughts when in this type of situation. Stockholm syndrome is something that women such as these and any child or women who are abused can easily end up with. It highlights the power men have over women and children and the traps they lay for the women. The biggest shock is the reach these gangs have and we see it in the book how everyone is connected to them somehow.

An absolutely heartbreaking and emotional read in which the author has managed to bring us an ending that lessens the horror of this book and one that feels right as well.

A story for our times that will not leave me for a while, I do know that!

Thanks to Damp Pebbles Blog Tours and Sophie Morton-Thomas for the copy of this compelling book.