Paris; the late 1960’s: Laurence Picq, a primary-school teacher, marries Suong Sikoeun, a Cambodian student. With him, she sets off on an adventure that will lead her into the heart of another civilization and culture, in search of a new world waiting to be invented.
After several years in Beijing and the birth of two daughters, her husband goes to join the revolution in Cambodia. She is allowed to join him in Phnom Penh in October 1975, just six months after the city was evacuated.
From the start, she copes bravely with the shortages and lack of comfort, as well as the suspicions and hostility of party cadres and her husband’s comrades. But daily life gradually slips from unpleasant to unbearable to absolutely terrifying. Fear and despair show their heads. For the sake of her daughters, aged 5 and 7, Laurence Picq gets involved in a veritable combat for survival – first within the Kafkaesque world of the Khmer leaders, then after the Vietnamese invasion, and finally, through a mind-boggling exodus from a ravaged Cambodia.
She makes it back to France in 1980.

Laurence Picq’s first-person account sheds light on key elements of the Khmer Rouge universe: the absolute secrecy and compartmentalization that explain why it was nearly impossible even for those who lived through it to have a clear, overall picture of the tragedy taking place inside their country. Suspicion and widespread pressure on people to inform on each other created an atmosphere of constant fear and caused people to keep everything in, never letting their true thoughts or feelings show.