In the Shadow of the Banyan

**THIS TITLE WILL ONLY BE AVAILABLE UNTIL 08/07/12**

“Vaddey Ratner’s novel is ravishing in its ability to humanize and personalize the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s….A truly important literary event.” —Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

“A compelling new voice in world literature.” —Bharati Mukherjee, author of Miss New India

“A work that at once both deeply wounds and profoundly uplifts. Ratner always offers us the glimmering thread of hope and love. She offers us wings.” —Naomi Benaron, author of Running the Rift

“An astonishing book, unlike anything else that has emerged from Cambodia and its tragedies….It is literature, and literature of a high order.” —Philip Short, author of Pol Pot and Mao: A Life

For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. Soon the family’s world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus.
Over the next four years, as she endures the deaths of family members, starvation, and brutal forced labor, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of childhood—the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival. Displaying the author’s extraordinary gift for language, In the Shadow of the Banyan is testament to the transcendent power of narrative and a brilliantly wrought tale of human resilience.

Vaddey Ratner was five years old when the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975. In 1981 she arrived in the United States as a refugee not knowing English and ultimately went on to graduatesumma cum laude from Cornell University. She lives in Potomac, Maryland.