Literary places in Phnom Penh

In the Shadow of the Banyan

Vaddey Ratner

The novel opens in Phnom Penh, where a seven-year-old girl of the royal family lives in comfort until, on 17 April 1975, the Khmer Rouge take the city and drive its whole population into the countryside at gunpoint. From there the map runs northwest, along the roads and rivers of the exodus into the rice provinces of Pursat and Battambang, where the family is broken apart by forced labour, hunger and killing. Ratner deliberately leaves her villages unnamed, so the rural points here mark the real region the deportations emptied into, not addresses the book supplies.

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