The Disappeared

A fiercely beautiful love story for the ages, The Disappeared traces one woman's three-decades-long journey from the peaceful streets of Montreal to the war-torn villages of Cambodia, as a brief affair turns into a grand passion of loss and remembrance, set against one of the most brutal genocides of our time. When sixteen-year-old Anne Greves first meets Serey, a Cambodian student forced to leave his country during the rise of the Khmer Rouge, she never considers the consequences of their complicated romance. Swept up in the infatuation of young love, Anne ignores her father's wishes and embraces her relationship with Serey in Montreal's smoky jazz clubs and in his cramped yellow bedroom. But when the borders of Cambodia are reopened, Serey must risk his life to return home in search of his family. A decade later, Anne will travel halfway around the world to find him, and to save their love from the same tragic forces that first brought them together. In aching, tender prose, Kim Echlin challenges our notions of how to both claim the past of move on after insufferable loss. Part elegy, part love letter, part call to arms, The Disappeared is a soaring tribute to those who have disappeared in the violent conflicts throughout history.

About the Author :
Kim Echlin is the author of Dagmar's Daughter and Elephant Winter, which won the Torgi Talking Book of the Year Award and was short-listed for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. She lives in Toronto.

Review :
"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 pain. Echlin dares a hard look at the best and worst of humanity and pulls off this ambitious feat with elegance and heart."--Zoëeuml; Ferraris, author of Finding Nouf "This book, which deals forthrightly with man's inhumanity to man, transcends its difficult subject matter by virtue of Echlin's brilliant and beautiful prose, which tenderizes everything that it touches. The Disappeared is a unique, powerful, quietly devastating book, and a true and important love story."--Peter Cameron, author of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You "This is a powerful and affecting novel, one that's willing to consider the greatest devotion and the most terrible cruelty. At the center of The Disappeared is a truly penetrating and unforgettable understanding of the circumstances of genocide."--John Dalton, author of Heaven Lake "The beautifully spare narrative is daringly imaginative in the details. . . . Echlin creates a sorrowfully compelling world . . . [in this] powerful, transcendent love story."--Publishers Weekly "[A] poignant love story . . . Lush and poetic . . . The Disappeared is a passionate and emotionally wrenching novel that forces us to remember and provides witness to what was lost."--BookPage.com "Sensual . . . Electrifying . . . [The Disappeared] is a miracle of economy whose short sentences and ellipses often draw on the powerful brevity of short-story technique. . . . The voice is singular and arresting. . . . [Written with] insidious urgency . . . [and] in an aroused but taut and plain prose that attaches the intensities of erotic love to the smell, sight, taste and touch of human suffering . . . Through [her] technical and stylistic virtuosity, allied with elliptical narrative brilliance, Echlin raises Anne's climactic ritual action to a level of tragic sublimity."--Stevie Davies, The Guardian (UK) "Finely chiseled prose . . . Undeniably beautiful . . . [With] moments of genuine tension and power."--Tash Aw, Telegraph (UK) "A dance of words . . . [full of] beauty, grace, sensuality and power. . . . In what is a seemingly impossible feat, the form is carved perfectly to the task--the book balances on the beauty. . . . Echlin is able, by imagination and art, to take the reader on a journey through eros and evil--a journey that travels into utter darkness but does not leave us in despair. . . . Echlin has wrought a work of singular beauty, a work which turns 'human cruelty' into the image of a particle of dust by a lover's cheek, into the rhythm of the sentences that carry knowledge of the world so all may witness."--The Chronicle Herald (Canada) "Like her passionate narrator, Anne Greve