When the Clouds Fell from the Sky: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father in the Killing Fields of Cambodia

‘An outstanding book of astonishing power … One finishes it with an ache in the heart’

JON SWAIN, writer and foreign correspondent, author of River of Time

‘Through a profoundly moving tale that weaves together the connected stories of a victim, his surviving family, and members of the regime, Robert Carmichael brings us into the heart of the darkness that took over Cambodia, bringing it alive in the way no mere statistics can. I’ve not seen a comparable book about these horrors’

ADAM HOCHSCHILD, award-winning author of King Leopold’s Ghost

‘The intimate and heartbreaking story of the disappearance of one man, and the decades of suffering that followed as his family searched for answers’

SETH MYDANS, former Southeast Asia correspondent for the New York Times

In 1977, Neary was two years old and living in Paris when her father Ouk Ket, a Cambodian diplomat, was recalled home ‘to get educated to better fulfil [his] responsibilities’. It was to be many years before Neary and her mother Martine were finally able to establish what had happened to Ket, their father and husband.

In this moving memoir, through a tragedy that engulfs a single family, journalist Robert Carmichael, explores with great sensitivity Phnom Penh’s infamous S-21 prison and its commander, Comrade Duch, and Cambodia’s descent into terror.

During the Khmer Rouge’s four-year reign of terror, two million people died in Cambodia. In telling the moving story of the quest of two women to learn the fate of their husband and father, Tell Me What Happened to My Father illuminates the tragedy of a nation.