Sold

Sold is a novel by the American writer Patricia McCormick, published in 2006. It tells the story of a girl from Nepal who is sold into sexual slavery in India, and it is written in short vignettes rather than conventional chapters.

Lakshmi is thirteen and lives with her family in a small hut in the mountains of Nepal. The family is desperately poor, but her life has simple pleasures in it, including the black-and-white speckled goat she is raising and the ritual of her mother brushing her hair by the light of an oil lamp.

When the Himalayan monsoon washes away what remains of the family's crops, Lakshmi's stepfather tells her that she must leave home and take a job to support them. He introduces her to a charming stranger who promises to find her work, and she travels with him out of the country into a brothel in India, where the debt she is told she owes keeps her in place. The novel stays inside her point of view from beginning to end, and it was adapted into a film in 2014.