What started as an impossible dream - to build a cafe that employs women recovering from prostitution and addiction - is helping to fuel an astonishing movement to bring freedom and fair wages to women producers worldwide where tea and trafficking are linked by oppression and the opiate wars.

Becca Stevens started the Thistle Stop Cafe to empower women survivors. But when she discovered a connection between cafe workers and tea labourers overseas, she embarked on a global mission called Shared Trade to increase the value of women survivors and producers across the globe.

As she recounts the victories and unexpected challenges of building the cafe, Becca also sweeps the reader into the world of tea, where timeless rituals transport to an era of beauty and the challenging truths about tea’s darker, more violent history. She offers moving reflections of the meaning of tea in our lives, plus recipes for tea blends that readers can make themselves.

In this journey of triumph for impoverished tea labourers, hope for cafe workers, and insight into the history of tea, Becca sets out to defy the odds and prove that love is the most powerful force for transformation on earth.