The Inheritance Powder

Travel Guide

Bangladesh

The novel is a fictional account of a very real situation. The development programme in the novel was, as in real life, well intentioned and meant to solve the problems of the lack of clean drinking water. But it had the opposite effect. The result was the slow poisoning by arsenic of millions of people in the affected areas and is still a problem which affects many people today.

In the author note, she explains more about this real life situation stating that usually Bangladesh like anywhere else, does have naturally occurring arsenic in its groundwater. This is particularly common in Deltaic regions apparently but Bangladesh is the worse affect country.

The tragedy was evoked and exposed in the book Venemous Earth by Andrew Meharg who then worked at the University of Aberdeen.

Places and people in the novel are of course fictional – Shimilganj for instance – but the city of Dhaka is of course real although you may not recognise much of the geography in the story.