Penguin.ca

“The Disappeared is an elegiac, beautifully told memory-tale of obsessive love. A teenaged Canadian woman falls in love with a young Cambodian refugee; after the fall of Pol Pot, her lover abandons her and returns home in search of his lost family. She follows him to Cambodia and takes the reader with her into one of the darkest chapters of 20th century history. On one level, the novel is a young Canadian woman’s bildungsroman; on another, a profoundly moving account of the genocidal horrors of the Cambodian killing fields and its terrible aftermath. Written in elegant, spare prose, The Disappeared confronts one of the most painful conflicts of our time; the collision between our private, personal desires and the brutal, dehumanizing facts of modern history.”
—The 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize Jury citation

“[A] masterful novel of meetings,
partings and cross-cultural love.”
—THE GLOBE AND MAIL

“A beautiful elegy.”
—WINNIPEG FREE PRESS

“The novel is set, unusually, in an exclusive boarding-school for the kids of Canada's elite and of foreign high-flyers, notably Julius, the American ambassador's confident son. There are a few girls in the school, one of them utterly beautiful and irresistible. The narrative is shared between Julius and his roommate Noel – less privileged, less attractive, a clever but confused loner. The traditional setting is offset by a sharp, m odern immediacy of style and form, and by the author's brilliantly authentic insight into adolescent sexuality and its heartbreaking delusions, dreams and betrayals. This is a strikingly well-achieved novel.”
—The 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize Jury citation

“There’s a smattering of Lord of the Flies …
and an undercurrent of Catcher in the Rye.…
The often stream-of-consciousness style
of this coming-of-age story is easily on
a par with these classics.”
—THE GLOBE AND MAIL