A story of love, despair and the search for truth. This is a novel that will stay with you long after you have read it. Echlin's story about a woman searching for, and finding lost love, only to lose it again, is moving and thought provoking. This is also a testament to the atrocities that took place in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, atrocities that must not be forgotten and a reason why novels such as this should be read.
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.
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. The Disappeared is her first novel to be published in the UK.
