The Secret Refugee

Africa in the nineteen-eighties. HIV and Aids are spreading far and wide, but no-one knows how far or how fast because HIV and Aids are political dynamite, and doing the research to find out means a fight through a minefield of committees, permissions, and official obstruction.

Nicholas Street is an ambitious and single-minded young surgeon in pursuit of a professional future, and Kulu a recently returned graduate, ambitious herself for work as a journalist, and unaware that her place in Nick's life is as temporary as his planned time in Africa. He is doing research of his own, but not to do with HIV and not for any purpose other than the furtherance of his career back in London.

Work and medical colleagues have made him aware of the problems that beset every aspect of the fight against HIV, but it isn't his problem, until he diagnoses HIV in a friend and has to start taking it seriously. Kulu already takes it seriously, and eventually gets her chance to enter the fight, but neither of them have any idea how HIV will come to affect both their lives. The Secret Refugee is about the Plague of the late twentieth century; about fear, ignorance, and blame, honesty and lies, and the real purpose of medical research.