A Walk Across the Sun begins in India, where two sheltered sisters, seventeen-year-old Ahalya and fifteen-year-old Sita, are happily strolling on the beach with their parents. Suddenly a tsunami destroys their home and kills their parents, grandmother, and devoted servant. The girls, desperate to get to safety, find a driver whom they expect to drive them to their school, where their teachers are waiting for them. Instead, the man sells them into sex slavery. Escape seems impossible. A kind woman who works in the brothel tells them that their only hope is to be reincarnated someday into a better life.
Then an American lawyer, Thomas Clarke, comes to India to work with an organization which attempts to save women from sex slavery. When he learns about the plight of these two underage girls, he becomes determined to save them. His efforts lead him eventually to Paris and then to the United States.
In another plot line, Thomas’ wife, grief-stricken after the death of their infant daughter, has left Thomas to return to her parents in India, and he attempts to persuade his wife to return to him.
The novel, which is endorsed by John Grisham, is a fascinating thriller, but it also makes readers more aware of the tragedy of an unusually cruel form of modern-day slavery.
(Helen Snow, retired from Information Services)