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.
- 'Echlin, one of Canada's finest prose stylists, approaches her subject with the delicacy and solemnity it deserves . . . The Disappeared is an expert novel, which manages to penetrate to the aching core of the Cambodian tragedy' NATIONAL POST, Canada
- 'A powerfully vivid narrative . . . Luminous' GLOBE AND MAIL, Canada
- 'A beautiful elegy . . . Anne Greves' story unfolds slowly, in spare and moving prose through fleeting moments and in floods of memory' WINNIPEG FREE PRESS, Canada
Trade Paperback:
£11.99
Published 06/08/2009