Yet despite the variations in backgrounds, personalities and experiences, each character is solid and real, and their stories gripping. We are thrown headlong into another’s world for a brief and intense moment before being just as abruptly removed and transplanted into the next. Time and chronology shift and remain unspecified – the reader must place themselves by picking up on clues from dress and dialogue. Fragmented and partial, the pieces here range from the mundane to the serious. McKay transcribes each moment from each life with a depth of understanding that is apparent and personal, and that doesn’t diminish whether the subject is Cambodian, a fleeting tourist or a long-established expatriate. I still feel like I’ve recently returned from somewhere else – somewhere sweaty, dusty and crowded. It’s been nearly a week now since I finished Laura Jean McKay’s collection of short stories, Holiday in Cambodia, and my feelings are a jumble of melancholy, pensiveness and something else that I can’t quite pin down.
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