A Harvest of Thorns

Book excerpt: A gripping new thriller that unpacks the horrors of exploitation in the garment industry, blending the nailbiting courtroom drama of John Grisham with the emotional heart of Khaled Hosseini. 'Poignant and engrossing ... Corban Addison will hold you spellbound with his elegant prose from his first word to his last' Wilbur Smith In Dhaka, Bangladesh, a garment factory burns to the ground, claiming the lives of hundreds of workers, mostly young women. Amid the rubble, a bystander captures a heart-stopping image-a teenage girl lying in the dirt, her body broken by a multi-storey fall, and over her mouth a mask of fabric bearing the label of one of America's largest retailers, Presto Omnishops Corporation. When the photo goes viral, it fans the flames of a decades old controversy about sweatshops, labour rights, and the ethics of globalization. A year later, in Washington, D.C., Joshua Griswold, a disgraced former journalist for the Washington Post, receives an anonymous summons from a corporate whistleblower promising information about Presto. He offers Griswold confidential information about Presto's apparel supply chain. For Griswold, the challenge of exposing Presto's wilful negligence is irresistible, as is the chance, however slight, at redemption. Deploying his old journalistic skills, he builds a historic case against Presto, setting the stage for a war in the courtroom and in the media that Griswold is determined to win - both to salvage his reputation and to provoke a revolution of conscience in Presto's boardroom that could change the course of the fashion industry across the globe.