The uncertainty, dread and scarred triumphs that thrum through Veasna’s book would affect readers at any time. Instead, his family’s terrifying ordeal in the dizzyingly bloody and swift maelstrom that killed one out of four Cambodians is used as an empathetic lens to turn unfathomable numbers into personal tragedies and victories.

Veasna grapples with the horrors of the Khmer regime in a bracingly direct fashion that avoids sentimentality or violence voyeurism. Starvation and night assassinations are recurring threats, with many people reduced to “living corpses.” Studded with maps, the story presents a documentarian’s clean historical sweep. They bargain for food, leverage their many acquaintances, and scramble to avoid notice of the murderous Khmer, whose capricious savagery (many are teenage boys) includes beheading boys for having Beatles haircuts and drowning intellectuals in a lake. In the following years, Veasna’s relatives become industrious and canny refugees. His middle-class parents and extended family find themselves in the flood of urban exiles driven from the city by Khmer cadres obsessed with an ill-planned vision of creating a Communist utopia in the countryside.

Born just days after the Khmer Rouge overthrew the U.S.-backed Cambodian government in 1975, Veasna starts in the chaos of Phnom Penh, where excitement was braided with anxiety over what would follow. The harrowing pages in between show why some of the faces in the concluding tree have been grayed out. Tian Veasna’s swiftly paced, overwhelming graphic memoir of the Cambodian genocide begins and ends with a family tree.

Year of the Rabbit by Tian Veasna