They get back together and Anne discovers why she has not heard from him in years. In the next part of the story, Anne reaches Cambodia, makes friends with locals, searches for Serey, and finally finds him. She decides to go to Cambodia in search of him. Then one day, around ten years later, while watching television, Anne recognizes Serey among a crowd which is shown in the news. Anne is not able to forget Serey and she is still very much in love with him, but he seems to have disappeared from her life. When she writes to him she doesn’t receive any reply. He says he will write to her but Anne doesn’t receive any letter from him. The Cambodian borders open and Serey goes back to his home country. Anne’s father finds out about Serey and warns Anne that he would leave and go back to his home country. Serey tells her about Cambodia and introduces her to a lot of Khmer music. Anne and Serey fall deeply in love and spend every free minute together. Now he is a student and a tutor at the university. Serey is from Cambodia and he left his homeland before the borders closed because of the civil war. He shows special interest in Anne and soon they start spending a lot of time with each other. Once when they are sitting in a bar listening to music, she meets a man Serey. This student Charlotte, whenever she goes out with friends, takes Anne also with her. Later when Anne has grown up to become a teenager and no longer has a nanny, her father hires one of his students to keep her company occasionally. Her nanny Berthe introduces her to music by smuggling her into bars as a child. He is a kind person but he doesn’t have time for her. Her father raises her with the help of a nanny. Her mother passed away when she was young. Anne is a high school student in Montreal. The present time when the story is narrated, the late ‘70s, when many of the initial events in the story happen and the main characters meet first and then the early ‘90s, when one of characters goes on a quest. ‘The Disappeared’ is set in two time periods. The first book which was part of the readalong was Kim Echlin’s ‘The Disappeared’. I have wanted to participate properly in the Literature and War Readalong hosted by Caroline from ‘Beauty is a Sleeping Cat’ for a while now and this year I thought I will do it.

The disappeared by kim echlin