I believed your body but I knew the words were untrue”, or the one-line chapter 45: “I can still see a particle of dust hanging in a sunbeam near your cheek as you slept” are undeniably beautiful but, ultimately, they merely flirt with tragedy rather than confront it. Sentences such as: “The ocean has one taste and it is salt.

The inevitable consequence of this is a slipping of poetry into sentimentality, which detracts from a frank examination of the crazed condition of love in a time of senseless war.

Although the finely chiselled prose strives constantly to capture the perfect image – and Echlin rarely puts a foot wrong in this regard – the distillation of such a huge amount of material into relatively few pages produces a density that often feels suffocating. It is often tempting to engage with the writing rather than the atrocities that it attempts to describe. In one two-page chapter, the first days of Pol Pot’s rule are recreated – an imagined Year Zero: “Banks. Yet it is the novel’s highly concentrated narrative style that takes centre stage, at times overshadowing even the horrifying details of the Khmer Rouge regime. Swiftly, she becomes absorbed into his world and his past, but already there are obstacles, for her father is vehemently opposed to her new lover (there is a memorably terse exchange between Papa and Serey on the difference between an immigrant and an exile). Anne is “drawn to the gloom and glory” of his exile she, too, wants an exotic past. But underneath this heady young relationship there is a more complex cultural dynamic at work. When they are not making love, they sit in a small room listening to “Khmer rockabilly and surf and soul and two-stringed and four-stringed guitars and Farfisa electric organs and rock drumming” and lyrics Anne does not understand. Much of Anne and Serey’s early time together involves exuberant youthful passion, lovingly recorded.

The disappeared by kim echlin