In his uncompromising, hallucinatory-vivid novel, Smoking the Poppy, Graham Joyce tells the story of an English electrician who receives a message from the Foreign Office that his student daughter has been detained in Thailand with a load of opium. Going to her rescue in the company of a friend from a quiz show like “What, Where, When” and his eldest son, a Christian fundamentalist, he finds himself in the very center of the “golden triangle” of the drug trade and is forced to confront both the “opium generals” and the centuries-old system of popular beliefs, enter into a mortal battle for the life and soul of his daughter with the Thai drug lords and the Spirit of Opium himself.