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Paperback Book Details
  • 02/2022
  • 9781737826507 978-1-7378265-0-7
  • 356 pages
  • $15.95
Lya Badgley
Author
The Foreigner's Confession
Lya Badgley, author

Adult; General Fiction (including literary and historical); (Market)

The Foreigner’s Confession is a dual timeline historical fiction novel set in war-time Cambodia. The two protagonists never meet but become deeply intertwined in a way that transcends time. An unexpected discovery at Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide leads American Emily Mclean on a journey through the country’s painful history and toward personal redemption in this suspense-filled page turner. After a horrific accident shatters her world and leaves her an amputee, American attorney Emily Mclean moves to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to work with landmine survivors. She hopes to reinvent herself in this new land, leaving behind her sense of culpability in the death of her husband and the loss of her unborn child. While visiting the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, Emily discovers that she shares an eerie resemblance to a portrait of a former prison inmate, Milijana Petrova, a Yugoslavian communist revolutionary who, in the 1970s, became fatally enmeshed with the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. Emily is not the only one who notices the astonishing similarity—her Cambodian driver insists she is the ghost of Milijana, come back to complete a mysterious task. This unexpected discovery consumes Emily, who starts desperately searching for answers about Milijana in historical documents from Cambodia’s devastating civil war. As she begins to uncover more clues about Milijana’s life—from the horrible mistakes she made to the terrible price she paid—further similarities between the two women start to emerge, and their stories become intertwined. What happens when life is turned upside down and the boundaries between past and present, life and death, are blurred? Can Emily’s discoveries help her to finally emerge from the pain of her own past, or will Milijana’s tragic end foretell her own?
Reviews
In Badgley’s well-researched, dual-timeline novel, the themes of loss and ghosts of the past intertwine in a story about the lingering aftermath of a repressive regime in Cambodia. It’s 1993, and Emily Mclean is an American attorney on the fast track to success until a tragic accident claims her family and her leg. To escape her grief, she accepts a position in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, working with a foundation helping victims of the land mines set by the repressive Khmer Rouge of the 1970s. Emily’s story of adjusting to her new country while learning Cambodia’s violent history interlaces with 1977 journal entries of a Communist revolutionary from Yugoslavia who fell victim to the brutal regime. A mysterious painting reveals a tie between the two women, linking their timelines and pointing a way forward for Emily to heal.

The standout character in this novel is the setting of Phnom Penh, evoked with vivid detail. Fourteen years after the Khmer Rouge’s end, the city remains war-torn, and gruesome relics of the past, like the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, pop off the page. The city’s inhabitants “all smiled,” Emily thinks, “but there was pain behind their eyes.”

The story moves at a clip, and the history lessons never feel heavy-handed. Emily progresses from a clueless, do-gooder American to an expat who embraces Cambodian culture. As an amputee, she discovers “her disability wasn’t a liability here, and it didn’t define her” as it had in the States. Her efforts to help, however, are stymied by her boss, Sonny, a Cambodian whose family fled but who returned as an adult to serve his homeland. Although he is a point of view character, Sonny is less fleshed-out, bouncing from gratitude for Emily’s help to sudden viciousness. Still, the novel is immersive, committed to capturing the texture of life amid striking historical detail.

Takeaway: A striking novel of an American supporting Cambodians in Phnom Penh in 1993.

Great for fans of: Rosemary Rawlins’s All My Silent Years and Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan.

Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

Kirkus Reviews

This debut historical novel reveals the lasting reverberations of Cambodia’s brutal past.
It’s 1993 at the beginning of Badgley’s story, and American lawyer Emily Mclean is reeling from the loss of her husband,
unborn daughter, and right lower leg in a car crash. In an effort to heal herself by working with people with similar injuries,
Emily takes a job with an organization based in Phnom Penh that assists amputees. Her new boss, Sonny, is skeptical of
Emily’s motives, believing that she is a privileged American who “has come to help herself by helping these poor people.”
Emily is determined to prove him wrong. Guided by her glamorous housemate, Yvette Morceau, Emily explores Phnom
Penh and falls in love with the city. A romantic spark flares between Emily and Nick Landrey, a rough-and-tumble journalist
from Louisiana—the first time she’s had feelings for someone since her husband’s death. She even considers adopting a
Cambodian child. Emily’s story is interspersed with flashbacks to 1977 and the first-person chronicle of Milijana Petrova, a
Yugoslavian woman being held in Phnom Penh’s notorious “prison for counter-revolutionary traitors.” When Emily visits
the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, a mysterious connection between herself and Milijana surfaces. Solving that mystery
will change Emily’s life forever. Badgley lived in Phnom Penh and worked at the Tuol Sleng Museum, and her personal
experience is apparent throughout her vivid, expertly plotted tale. Whether she’s noting that “leather shoes were known to
sprout mushrooms” during the monsoon season or describing the Phnom Penh expatriate community, the author’s astute
observations about weather, landscape, and personalities bring her story to life. But Badgley’s impressive
character-building and nuanced understanding of Cambodian history are marred slightly by misplaced commas (“No, I
don’t. But I’d like, too”) and her occasional use of dialogue as heavy-handed exposition. Still, these minor problems do not
detract from the author’s passionate narrative, which will continue to surprise readers until the very end.
A gripping tale about Cambodia that offers impeccable research and a strong sense of place.

Formats
Paperback Book Details
  • 02/2022
  • 9781737826507 978-1-7378265-0-7
  • 356 pages
  • $15.95
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