Actually, it had a musical quality to it as well - almost like she was lilting a little song in your ear.If it was a song though, it was the most heartbreaking song you have ever heard in your life. The way she writes is gorgeous - it has the lyrical quality of poetry with perfect sentence construction. The Cambodian genocide of the late 1970s which claimed some two million lives – collateral damage is far too much about the innocent victims – looms large in Echlin’s searing book that attempts to give names and faces to the far too many that disappeared, and the few who tried to survive with some semblance of humanity intact.This was undoubtedly one of the prettiest books about a horrific topic that I have ever read. Through the tragic love story of two lost souls, Kim Echlin adds an urgent human dimension to the unbearable numbers of history’s inhumanity. But it cannot last and Serey becomes one of the many millions of “disappeared.” But in her utter grief – how ironically, tragically fitting that her name, Greves, is a homonym for ‘grieves’ – Anne cannot, will not ever let Serey go. Their reunion is overwhelming with both intense loss and joy. Now fluent in Khmer, Anne meets a local driver, Mau, who eventually, remarkably leads her to Serey. Eleven years later, Anne travels to Phnom Penh, convinced that she saw Serey in a television report. Anne is devastated, growing more despondent when she does not hear from him.

Anne leaves her widowed father who shuns her new lover, admonishing her for being so young and foolish.īut the ghosts of his family call Serey home, and he must return to find out what has happened to them. Initially, love is enough for Anne and Serey, and they are caught up only in each other. He is in Canada to further his studies in mathematics from his native Cambodia, the only member of his family to escape the vicious Khmer Rouge genocide.

Serey is an older man, already in his 20s, a musician, who has already lived too hard a young life. One Halloween night when Anne Greves is 16, she goes with older friends to a jazz club and falls in love for the first time in her young life.

The disappeared by kim echlin