First They Killed My Father
by Loung Ung
She was five when the Khmer Rouge came. She survived.
For you if
you want to understand the Khmer Rouge through the childhood it stole from a specific child
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Loung Ung was five years old when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh in 1975. Her father was a military police captain — a death sentence under the new regime. The family scattered, hid their identities, tried to survive. Loung became a child soldier. This memoir is the dispatch from inside a childhood that the Khmer Rouge manufactured — the specific terror of being a child who must forget who she is in order to live. Written with the directness of someone who decided that the only way to honor what happened was to say it plainly.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Cambodia • Southeast Asia
- Voice
- Written by a Cambodian author
- Topics
- khmer rouge
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