However, their attempts to create their envisioned utopia largely failed, leading instead to widespread famine and disease, since they refused to even allow for foreign medicine.

The Khmer Rouge was fundamentally isolationist, and desired to run a completely self-sustaining agricultural country based on a collectivist mindset.

The regime immediately began evacuating cities, executing anyone who could possibly be perceived as a political threat-usually by having even the most tenuous ties to Western culture and thus Western capitalism-and establishing labor camps and training centers for child soldiers. In spite of American bombing campaigns against them, the Khmer Rouge gathered enough power to emerge from the jungles and overthrow the state government in Phnom Penh in 1975, installing themselves as the new ruling regime under the dictator Pol Pot, who renamed Cambodia as Democratic Kampuchea. Throughout the 1960s, the Khmer Rouge represented a fringe element of Cambodian politics, slowly growing in size and power while hiding in the Cambodian jungle and receiving support from other Communist forces such as the North Vietnamese Viet Cong and Laos’s Communist army, the Pathet Lao. “Khmer Rouge” describes adherents of the Communist Party of Kampuchea that rose to power in Cambodia in the mid-1970s. He still lives in Salt Lake City, Utah with his wife Alicyn and is an active member of the Mormon Church. Wright followed up with T he Orphan Keeper in 2016 and The Other Side of the Bridge in 2018. The book was published in 2012 and won Best Novel of the Year from the Whitney awards, and it was also a nominee for the International DUBLIN Literary Award. After one of his four children filmed a documentary about the Stung Meanchey dump in Cambodia, Wright returned to his writing career and used the film’s story as the basis of the novel The Rent Collector.

Despite the success of his first book, Wright took a decade-long break from writing to focus on his business and design career, which over the years involved owning several retail stores and working as a designer alongside his wife for the McCall Pattern Company in New York. Wright published his first novel Letters for Emily in 2001, which won a Reader’s Choice award, was selected for several book clubs, and has been published in multiple countries. Although Wright began an MBA, he gave it up to begin his writing career.

Camron Wright grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he also studied and earned a master’s degree in Writing and Public Relations at Westminster College.

The rent keeper book