NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Shortlisted for the Jum Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes • A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year • One of CBC’s Best Canadian Nonfiction Books of the Year • The inaugural title from Alchemy by Knopf Canada: A searing account by an exquisite writer who came to Canada as a baby, escaping war in Cambodia.

In 1980, Y-Dang Troeung and her family were among the last of the 60,000 refugees from Cambodia that then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to relocate to Canada. As the final arrivals, their landing was widely documented in newspapers, with photographs of the PM shaking Y-Dang's father's hand, reaching out to pat baby Y-Dang's head. Forty years later, in her brilliant, astonishing book, Y-Dang returns to this moment, and to many others before and after, to explore the tension between that public narrative of happy “arrival,” and the multiple, often hidden truths of what happened to the people in her family.
In precise, beautiful prose accompanied by moving black-and-white visuals, Y-Dang weaves back and forth in time to tell stories about her parents and two brothers who lived through the Cambodian genocide, about the lives of her grandparents and extended family, about her own childhood in the refugee camps and in rural Ontario, and eventually about her young son’s illness and her own diagnosis with a terminal disease. Through it all, Y-Dang looks with bracing clarity at refugee existence, refusal of gratitude, becoming a scholar, and love.

Y-Dang Troeung's profile page

• Short-listed, OLA Evergreen Award

Y-DANG TROEUNG was Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, where she did research and taught in the fields of transnational Asian literatures, critical refugee studies, global south studies, and critical disability studies. She was also an Associate Editor of the journal Canadian Literature, and a 2020 Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. Her recent publications can be found in Canadian Literature, Brick: A Literary Magazine, Amerasia Journal, and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Y-Dang passed away in November 2022, after completing the final draft of her extraordinary memoir, Landbridge.

See also: http://www.y-dang.com/

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 JIM DEVA PRIZE FOR WRITING THAT PROVOKES
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 OLA EVERGREEN AWARD
ONE OF THE CBC'S BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF 2023
“Landbridge will radically reshape your understanding of the power exchange between a host country and its immigrants. But it will also reassure you that it’s possible for a story about trauma and displacement to always be about love, and for love to be the centre of any life.”—Kaliane Bradley, The Guardian

“Landbridge is the most unforgettable book I’ve read in years, a work of astounding humanity and honesty in the face of unimaginable grief. It is no small undertaking, to wrestle with the generational toll of genocide, migration, upended pasts and unreachable futures, yet this is what Y-Dang Troeung does. In their totality, the fragments that make up this memoir are a vital, visceral reminder that, across all manner of tragedy and violence and even time, we are bound to one another by love. For all the pain it charts and of which its author manages to make meaning, Landbridge is, above all else, a love story, one that will be remembered.” —Omar al Akkad, Giller-prize winning author of What Strange Paradise and American War
“Heartbreaking, courageous and exceptional—after finishing Landbridge you will want to call everyone you know to tell them to please start reading. You will tell them it is a matter of urgency. This rare book by Y-Dang Troeung is unforgettable.” —Linn Ullmann, author of Unquiet
"Landbridge is the most courageous act of love . . . a book that illuminates with laser-bright insight the duty of the 'survivor.' Y-Dang's wisdom, stoicism and brilliance survive in this masterpiece to console and guide generations to come." —Alice Pung, author of Unpolished Gems
“Y-Dang Troeung’s presence feels so alive in these pages, where wonder and sorrow, motherhood and history trace one another across time, and unspool the shape of our present. Landbridge has forever altered what I know, how I love, and what I hope.” —Madeleine Thien, Giller-prize winning author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing
“Landbridge is among the most profound and heartbreaking accounts to emerge from the Cambodian diaspora. Y-Dang Troeung weaves a complex narrative that speaks to the unceasing traumas of war and dislocation. Each of the fragments rendered here shimmers like a small jewel, at once spare and prismatic. Equal parts memoir, history and love letter, the collection as a whole is nothing less than a tapestry of life itself, made more beautiful and precious because it is wrought from the salvaged pieces of all that is broken. A rare and stunning achievement that deserves its place in the literary canon.” —Vaddey Ratner, author of In the Shadow of the Banyan and Music of the Ghosts