In The Shadow Of The Banyan

I have read a fair amount of nonfiction about Cambodia over the years, but when I was researching new books to read while in Cambodia and SE Asia I came across a well-received novel, In The Shadow Of The Banyan (2012) by Vaddey Ratner, and thought that it would be a good book to start with. It is basically the autobiographical story of Vaddey fictionalized-seven year old Raami is driven from her upper class home in Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge and survives the horrific mass collectivization that would claim the lives of one to two million people before liberation by the Vietnamese. But the book is more than that-it is about resilience and self-preservation, the bound between a father and daughter, as well as the importance of poetry and stories in life. The narrative here brings to life the misery that millions suffered under the yoke of the Khmer Rogue that sometimes seems abstract when you merely discuss numbers. It is a harrowing story of needless waste of human lives and was hard to bear at times-I was glad that I was alternating chapters from this book with Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad which has a much lighter comic tone. Ratner's book is a powerful testimony of one of humanity's worst atrocities.