The book has its own website - www.whencloudsfell.com. This page is a short explanation of the book; for a more comprehensive look please visit the other site.

When Clouds Fell from the Sky weaves the stories of five people whose lives intersected to catastrophic effect in the maelstrom of 1970s Cambodia, and explains how the consequences of that collision remain relevant today.

The book was published in April 2015, the 40th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge. The ebook is currently available on Kindle; the hardback and paperback are available in Cambodia through Monument Books. See the book’s website for details of where to buy it and what it costs.

Synopsis

In 1977 a young Cambodian diplomat called Ouk Ket was recalled to Phnom Penh from his post in Senegal. He and his family were under the impression that he would take part in the rebuilding of his country, but on his return he disappeared.

His family never heard from him again.

Left behind in France were his wife, Martine, whom Ket had met while studying in Paris, and their two children. Their daughter, Neary, was just two when Ket left and the family never heard from him again. It was years before they knew what had happened to Ket and it took much longer to come to terms with his fate.

Ket had grown up in Phnom Penh and was close to his cousin Sam Sady. When the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia in April 1975, Sady, her family and Ket’s family were among the millions forcibly evacuated into brutal agricultural cooperatives. Sady’s story recounts how Pol Pot’s 1975-79 rule affected ordinary Cambodians when around 2 million people, or one in four of the population, died.

The person linking them is Comrade Duch, the former head of S-21, where it is thought at least 15,000 so-called enemies of the revolution were tortured and executed. Fewer than a dozen inmates survived. In 2009 Duch was tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, found guilty and sentenced to 35 years. He appealed, and in 2012 was jailed for life.

The paths of these five people crossed in the 1970s and again in 2009 when Neary and Martine testified as civil parties at Duch’s trial to tell the UN-backed court how Ket’s disappearance had shattered their lives.