The Dancing Boy

Every week, thirty British troops seek medical help, the toll of combat in Afghanistan.
A total of 3,021 were diagnosed with ‘Adjustment disorder’ between May 2010 and April 2012.
In the US and elsewhere, this figure is significantly higher.
Symptoms include self-harm, drug abuse and anxiety attacks.
This is an account of Tom Gillet, who, to the detriment of his sanity and family, refuses point-blank to acknowledge these symptoms
With the Afghan heat blinding his sight, Tom Gillet, a young British soldier, is dragged back from an IED by Shafiq, a small Afghan boy. Luckily, he only loses a foot and not his life.
Shafiq isn’t so fortunate. His family is murdered by the Taliban as a warning to those who help the coalition forces, and he is sold into a child trafficking ring as a dancing boy.
Discharged from the army and on the threshold of PTSD, Gillet feels forced to return to Afghanistan to search for the boy in the hope of finding him a better life.
But what he encounters is shock, betrayal and lies.
When he returns home to the UK, he finds himself drawn into the horrors of a world he never knew existed behind the closed doors of immigrant Britain.