Before The Pendant: The Prequel to The Lotus Between Worlds (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798250957809)

Cambodia, 1965. Neary Chen is fifteen, arguing with footnotes and wanting more than the market stall she was born into. Sovann Prum is eighteen, quiet in the way people mistake for slowness, and very deliberately leaving a history book on the corner stool of her family's noodle shop. He will tell himself it was an accident. He will know, by the time he reaches the end of the lane, that it wasn't.

What begins over a drought paper and a disputed footnote becomes, slowly and stubbornly, something neither of them planned for - river mornings, margin arguments, a life built together in a Battambang that smells of charcoal and lemongrass and thirty years of cooking. By turns funny, tender, and quietly devastating, Before the Pendant is a novel about what people build when they are allowed to - and what it means to carry that with you when the world you built it in is gone.