Landbridge

Life in Fragments

De: Y-Dang Troeung

Narrado por: Christine L. Nguyen, Chris Patterson

OLA Evergreen Award, Short-listed

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, 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.

©2023 Y-Dang Troeung (P)2023 Knopf Canada

Reseñas de la Crítica

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 JIM DEVA PRIZE FOR WRITING THAT PROVOKES
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 OLA EVERGREEN AWARD

ONE OF THE CBC'S BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF 2023

“Landbridge will radically reshape your understanding of the power exchange between a host country and its immigrants. But it will also reassure you that it’s possible for a story about trauma and displacement to always be about love, and for love to be the centre of any life.”—Kaliane Bradley, The Guardian

“Landbridge is the most unforgettable book I’ve read in years, a work of astounding humanity and honesty in the face of unimaginable grief. It is no small undertaking, to wrestle with the generational toll of genocide, migration, upended pasts and unreachable futures, yet this is what Y-Dang Troeung does. In their totality, the fragments that make up this memoir are a vital, visceral reminder that, across all manner of tragedy and violence and even time, we are bound to one another by love. For all the pain it charts and of which its author manages to make meaning, Landbridge is, above all else, a love story, one that will be remembered.” —Omar al Akkad, Giller-prize winning author of What Strange Paradise and American War

“Heartbreaking, courageous and exceptional—after finishing Landbridge you will want to call everyone you know to tell them to please start reading. You will tell them it is a matter of urgency. This rare book by Y-Dang Troeung is unforgettable.” —Linn Ullmann, author of Unquiet

"Landbridge is the most courageous act of love . . . a book that illuminates with laser-bright insight the duty of the 'survivor.' Y-Dang's wisdom, stoicism and brilliance survive in this masterpiece to console and guide generations to come." —Alice Pung, author of Unpolished Gems