Comrade Sao

Firos Iseu opens his memoir with the date he says he will never forget: Thursday, April 17, 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh and overthrew General Lon Nol's government and his Republican Party. The book recounts his life under the Khmer Rouge's brutal rule in Cambodia, from April 1975 to January 1979.

Iseu was only 12 when the regime's first wave of killings took his parents and older siblings from him in an instant. Of mixed Indian, Laotian and Vietnamese heritage, he was labeled a "17 April" or "new" person, which made him an outsider and a second-class citizen. The book takes its title from his "revolutionary name", Comrade Sao.

The account shows the courage and resourcefulness he needed to survive terrifying circumstances. It is a harrowing, unflinching and honest narrative that sheds light on one of the darkest chapters of the past 50 years.