Slavery is illegal throughout the world, yet more than twenty-seven million people are still trapped in one of history's oldest social institutions. Kevin Bales's disturbing story of contemporary slavery reaches from Pakistan's brick kilns and Thailand's brothels to various multinational corporations. His investigations reveal how the tragic emergence of a "new slavery" is inextricably linked to the global economy.--From publisher description.

There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings.

The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic.

House of Meetings is about one such liaison. It is a triangular romance: two brothers fall in love with the same girl, a nineteen-year-old

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Kris Bjornson, one of a group of slaves dumped on an uninhabited planet by their Catteni masters, learns to survive with the help of renegade exile Zainal, but when the time comes to join in a revolution against the Catteni, she is torn between her love for Zainal and her desire to return to Earth.