Early Reviewers

What if the love that teaches you how to feel belongs to someone you met sixty years before you were born?

Virak is thirty-two, Cambodian-American, gay, and adrift—haunting his own life in Oakland while his parents' silence about the Khmer Rouge keeps an entire identity just out of reach. When he begins learning classical Apsara dance at a local temple, hoping to reclaim the culture his trauma-scarred family couldn't give him, he's pulled across time into a Cambodia on the edge of catastrophe. There, he finds belonging, community, and a love more consuming than anything he's ever known—one that will change him permanently, whatever the cost.

Tenderly funny, devastating, and deeply moving, The Dancer's Shadow is a novel about diaspora and longing, about the silence between immigrant generations, and about the radical act of insisting that queer lives have always existed—even when no one wrote them down.