A sixteen year old girl falls in love with a Cambodian student.
A revolutionary closes the borders of a country for four years.
Families, friends, lovers disappear.
Kim Echlin’s powerful new novel tells the story of Anne Greves, from Montreal, who meets Serey, a Cambodian student forced into exile when he cannot return home during Pol Pot’s time of terror. Anne and Serey meet in a jazz club where their shared passion for music turns into a passion for each other, against the will of her father.
But when the borders of Cambodia open, Serey is compelled to return home, alone, to try to find his family. Left behind, and without word from her lover, Anne tries to build a new life but she cannot forget her first love. She decides to travel to the war-ravaged country that claimed Serey. What she finds there is a traumatized and courageous people struggling to create new freedoms out of the tragedy that claimed their traditional ways, their livelihood, and a seventh of their population.
“Despair is an unwitnessed life,” writes Anne as she searches for the truth, about her lover, and about herself. “If we live long enough, we have to tell, or turn to stone inside.”
From its first page, The Disappeared takes us into the land of kings and temples, fought over for generations. It reveals the forces that act on love everywhere: family, politics, forgetting. Universal in its questions about how to claim the past, how to honor our dead, and how to go on after those we love disappear, it is a story written in spare and rhythmic prose. The Disappeared is a remarkable consideration of language, truth, justice, and memory that speaks to the conscience of the world, and to love, even when those we love most are gone.
Praise For The Disappeared
Echlin’s pristine prose – there’s a poet in there somewhere – evokes the pull of eros as Anne searches for the man she loves in one of the world’s most dangerous places. But Echlin is equally skilled at portraying the effects of trauma on the human spirit.
–Now Magazine
“[A] masterful novel of meetings, partings and cross-cultural love ... Echlin’s storytelling, shifting continents and years in a paragraph, gathers much of its pace and grace equally from her lyrical prose ... The book, which can be read in a single sitting, builds toward a complex expression of annihilating loss and eternal love that is best experienced, in a sense, like the final act of a tragic play: as something inevitable and beyond the calculations of reason.”
—The Globe and Mail
“A beautiful elegy about two lovers who struggle to overcome the betrayal of their families and their fellow man ... infused with wonder.”—The Winnipeg Free Press
We at Hamish Hamilton Canada have our favourite sentences from each of our carefully selected books, but we wanted to know which sentences are special to the authors who wrote them.
Here in her own handwriting is one of Kim Echlin’s favourites.
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