Become a Readings Member to make your shopping experience even easier. Sign in or sign up for free!

Become a Readings Member. Sign in or sign up for free!

Hello Readings Member! Go to the member centre to view your orders, change your details, or view your lists, or sign out.

Hello Readings Member! Go to the member centre or sign out.

Holiday in Cambodia
Paperback

Holiday in Cambodia

$34.99
Sign in or become a Readings Member to add this title to your wishlist.

Beyond the killing fields and the temples of Angkor Wat is Cambodia: a country with a genocidal past and a wide, open smile. A frontier land where anything is possible - at least for Western expatriates. In these loosely linked stories, Laura Jean McKay takes us deep into this complex country, exploring the uneasy spaces where local and foreign lives meet.

Three backpackers board a train, ignoring the danger signs - and find themselves used as bargaining chips in a terrible game. A jaded expat, tired of real girls, falls in love with an ancient statue. As they explore the sweltering streets of Phnom Penh, two Australian tourists come face to face with the cracks in their marriage.

There are devastating re-imaginings of the country’s troubled history, as well as tender, funny moments of tentative understanding. These are bold and haunting stories, deftly told.

Read More
In Shop
Out of stock
Shipping & Delivery

$9.00 standard shipping within Australia
FREE standard shipping within Australia for orders over $100.00
Express & International shipping calculated at checkout

MORE INFO
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Black Inc.
Country
Australia
Date
26 June 2013
Pages
208
ISBN
9781863956062

Beyond the killing fields and the temples of Angkor Wat is Cambodia: a country with a genocidal past and a wide, open smile. A frontier land where anything is possible - at least for Western expatriates. In these loosely linked stories, Laura Jean McKay takes us deep into this complex country, exploring the uneasy spaces where local and foreign lives meet.

Three backpackers board a train, ignoring the danger signs - and find themselves used as bargaining chips in a terrible game. A jaded expat, tired of real girls, falls in love with an ancient statue. As they explore the sweltering streets of Phnom Penh, two Australian tourists come face to face with the cracks in their marriage.

There are devastating re-imaginings of the country’s troubled history, as well as tender, funny moments of tentative understanding. These are bold and haunting stories, deftly told.

Read More
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Black Inc.
Country
Australia
Date
26 June 2013
Pages
208
ISBN
9781863956062
 
Book Review

Holiday in Cambodia
by Laura Jean McKay

by Jo Boyce, Jun 2013

It’s been nearly a week now since I finished Laura Jean McKay’s collection of short stories, Holiday in Cambodia, and my feelings are a jumble of melancholy, pensiveness and something else that I can’t quite pin down. I still feel like I’ve recently returned from somewhere else – somewhere sweaty, dusty and crowded. Somewhere foreign.

McKay transcribes each moment from each life with a depth of understanding that is apparent and personal, and that doesn’t diminish whether the subject is Cambodian, a fleeting tourist or a long-established expatriate. Fragmented and partial, the pieces here range from the mundane to the serious. Time and chronology shift and remain unspecified – the reader must place themselves by picking up on clues from dress and dialogue. We are thrown headlong into another’s world for a brief and intense moment before being just as abruptly removed and transplanted into the next. Yet despite the variations in backgrounds, personalities and experiences, each character is solid and real, and their stories gripping.

The collection opens with ‘Route Four’. A small Cambodian boy assists three tourists on the train; they are intent on getting to Kampot, and he is intent on relieving them of their luggage. Their journey is languid and slow, until something unexpected changes the tempo of the story with brutal swiftness. ‘If You Say It, It Must Be True’ focuses on the banal give-and-take between an unhappily married couple. Anna and Ray’s constant misunderstanding and inability to communicate was something that really struck me. Their relationship was like a broken zip – the teeth that once matched perfectly will no longer meet, no matter how hard you pull.

Choppy and unpredictable, the effect of this collection is bracing and powerful, and is one that has not left me yet. Highly recommend.


Jo Boyce