The Disappeared: An Unforgettable Novel Set Against the Backdrop of the Pol Pot Era

The Disappeared: An Unforgettable Novel Set Against the Backdrop of the Pol Pot Era

by KimEchlin (Author)

Synopsis

After more than 30 years Anne Greves feels compelled to break her silence about her first lover, and a treacherous pursuit across Cambodia's killing fields. Once she was a motherless girl from taciturn immigrant stock. Defying fierce opposition, she falls in love with Serey, a gentle rebel and exiled musician. She's still only 16 when he leaves her in their Montreal flat to return to Cambodia And, after a decade without word, she abandons everything to search for him in the bars of Phnom Penh, a city traumatized by the Khmer Rouge slaughter. Against all odds the lovers are reunited, and in a political country where tranquil rice paddies harbour the bones of the massacred, Anne pieces together a new life with Serey. But there are wounds that love cannot heal, and some mysteries too dangerous to know. And when Serey disappears again, Anne discovers a story she cannot bear. Haunting, vivid, elegiac, The Disappeared is a tour de force; at once a battle cry and a piercing lamentation, for truth, for love.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
Publisher: Abacus
Published: 06 Aug 2009

ISBN 10: 0349122407
ISBN 13: 9780349122403

Media Reviews
Spellbinding . . . There is something of Marguerite Duras in these pages, something of the lust between the young Western girl and the Asian man that drove novels like The Lover and The North China Lover. But while Duras focuses mostly on desire, Echlin focuses on absolute love--physical desire coupled with the need to know everything about the beloved, to follow him even to the grave and beyond. . . . Echlin captures the beauty and horror of Cambodia in equal measure . . . [and] love and death pulsate through [her] pages, interlaced. . . . Exquisite . . . [Echlin] creates alchemy. She permits what has been unsaid to be said, and what has been nameless to be named at last. -- The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) The Disappeared is a contemplation of horror, and a ferocious look at love. While all the 'nameless missing' of the Cambodian genocide gather around the characters like ghosts, the story also thrums with life, love, sensuality, tenderness and brutal
Author Bio
Kim Echlin lives in Toronto, Canada. She has been an arts documentary producer for CBC television, and has written the novels Elephant's Water and Dagmar's Daughter.