Landbridge Life in Fragments

Hardback (29 Aug 2023)

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Publisher's Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER  Shortlisted for the Jum Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes  A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year  One of CBC's Best Canadian Nonfiction Books of the Year  The inaugural title from Alchemy by Knopf Canada: A searing account by an exquisite writer who came to Canada as a baby, escaping war in Cambodia.

In 1980, Y-Dang Troeung and her family were among the last of the 60,000 refugees from Cambodia that then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to relocate to Canada. As the final arrivals, their landing was widely documented in newspapers, with photographs of the PM shaking Y-Dang's father's hand, reaching out to pat baby Y-Dang's head. Forty years later, in her brilliant, astonishing book, Y-Dang returns to this moment, and to many others before and after, to explore the tension between that public narrative of happy "arrival," and the multiple, often hidden truths of what happened to the people in her family.
    In precise, beautiful prose accompanied by moving black-and-white visuals, Y-Dang weaves back and forth in time to tell stories about her parents and two brothers who lived through the Cambodian genocide, about the lives of her grandparents and extended family, about her own childhood in the refugee camps and in rural Ontario, and eventually about her young son's illness and her own diagnosis with a terminal disease. Through it all, Y-Dang looks with bracing clarity at refugee existence, refusal of gratitude, becoming a scholar, and love.

Book information

ISBN: 9781039008762
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Imprint: Alchemy by Knopf Canada
Pub date:
Language: English
Number of pages: 312
Weight: 420g
Height: 217mm
Width: 146mm
Spine width: 28mm