Loung Ung was only five when Pol Pot’s deranged Khmer Rouge army stormed Cambodia’s capital in 1975. Their mission: a collective nation of peasant farmers, with no one more skilled, schooled or nourished than anyone else. Loung and her large, loving family were expelled from their middle-class home, marched into the countryside, forced to work the land and fed almost nothing. Death took various forms, all of them violent. As their numbers diminished, the family dispersed in order to survive. Loung found herself a child soldier in a camp for orphaned girls, helplessly shouting slogans for the army that was killing her family. Only after the Vietnamese destroyed the Khmer Rouge in 1979 were Loung and her surviving siblings reunited. Bolstered by the stunning bravery of a brother and the gentle kindness of a sister, Loung forged through inconceivable trauma to start afresh at a very young age. In this harrowing yet beautiful, crucially important memoir, she documents one of the worst genocides in modern history and shows the value of life to all those who take it for granted.
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