A LAWYER trained in Keighley has published a second novel covering an equally hard-hitting topic.

Abda Khan’s 2016 debut novel Stained focused on rape and the inequalities suffered by South Asian women and was dubbed a “contemporary Tess of the d’Urbervilles”.

The follow-up, Razia, is described as a thrilling story of a lawyer’s fight for justice across continents for a modern-day slave.

Abda Khan, who was recently named British Muslim Woman of the Year 2019, worked for a town centre law firm for two years.

Born in Bradford, she now lives in the Midlands and as a novelist specialises in challenging and often taboo subjects.

After writing Razia, Abda decided to crowdfund the book with the publisher, Unbound, inviting potential readers to place pre-orders for online copies of the printed book.

The novel asks how far someone would go to free a slave, and focuses on Farah, a young lawyer living and working in London.

She has just ended a long relationship, and her parents are looking for a husband – whether Farah wants one or not.

At a work dinner, hosted by a dangerously powerful man, she comes across a young woman called Razia, who Farah soon realises is being kept as a domestic slave.

Farah travels from the law courts of London to the brick kilns of Lahore, and there she begins to uncover the traps that keep generations of people enslaved. Everywhere she turns there is deep-rooted oppression and corruption.

She teams up with a human rights lawyer, Ali, to seek justice for Razia, but they cannot prevent the disaster that unfolds. Will Farah discover the explosive secret behind these tragic events?

A lawyer turned novelist, Abda won the Noor Inayat Khan Muslim Woman of the Year Award 2019 and was Highly Commended in the 2017 Nat West Asian Woman of Achievement Awards in the Arts and Culture category.

Abdur was also one of the speakers at the 2016 Ilkley Literature Festival, presenting a project articulating the voices of women who have survived some of life’s most extreme situations.

Razia is available to buy as a paperback or e-book from Amazon.