Kim Fay

As well as being published by the Ballantine Books division of Random House here in the US, The Map of Lost Memories will also be published in the UK (and its Commonwealth countries) by Hodder & Stoughton, and in translation in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Holland, Italy and Hungary. Details on translated versions coming soon.

About The Map of Lost Memories:
In 1925 Shanghai, a city of ambiguous ethics where nothing is what it seems, Irene Blum arrives to convince Khmer scholar and temple robber Simone Merlin to help her find a set of copper scrolls believed to contain the lost history of Cambodia’s ancient Khmer empire. United by a deep passion for the Khmer, the women commit a surprising act of violence. But as they flee to Indochina, they begin to realize that their hidden motives for finding the scrolls are strongly opposed. Traveling from Saigon to Phnom Penh, they are joined by Irene’s love interest Marc Rafferty; Louis Finot, a curator for the Cambodian temples; and the dying Henry Simms, the Svengali who raised Irene and sent her to the Orient. Together they head for the jungle, where each discovery reveals that their pasts are entwined in ways they never could have imagined. Opposed by a self-serving French government official and local villagers enlisted to protect the country’s great treasure, they fight their way toward their goal, where Irene learns that finding the scrolls means not only solving the puzzle of the Khmer's history, but also discovering the history of her own life.

On the way to publication ...
While it was a work in progress, The Map of Lost Memories (originally titled In Yellow Babylon), made it into the Top 100 of Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Competition. Part of getting that far meant receiving a review from Publishers Weekly. The following is from that review:

"Atmospheric, lyrical, and written in almost painfully beautiful prose, this historical novel sings like a coloratura soprano performing in a gorgeous opera ... Irene, the protagonist, loses her mother as a young girl. She tries to fill the yawning void that loss created with a dream of adventure. The grail she seeks at the encouragement of her mentor, a wealthy temple-looter named Mr. Simms, is a set of long-lost Cambodian scrolls that explain the mysterious fall of the Khmer and their once-glorious kingdom at Angkor Wat. There is symbolic significance here---Irene's childhood "kingdom" was ripped apart by the loss of her mother---but she is not maudlin or sentimental, nor is this novel. As a twenty-nine-year old living in revolutionary Shanghai, Irene plans her Cambodian quest in an atmosphere of contrasts---languor and violence, wealth and poverty, virtue and dissipation. Midway through the novel, she finally sets out. Accompanying her are Simone, a Sanskrit-reading femme fatale; Louis, Simone's once-and-future fiance; and Marc, a bar proprietor and love interest ... the author's evocation of the setting and the foreign misfits that inhabited it is nothing short of magical; the prose, extraordinary."