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Just when the political situation in Myanmar seems to reach a disastrous apex, it usually surprises the world – and gets significantly worse. In September, 2007, the military dictatorship that rules the country, formerly known as Burma, killed hundreds of Buddhist monks and other peacefully demonstrating civilians. Last year, when Cyclone Nargis devastated the Irrawaddy Delta, Senior General Than Shwe dithered about allowing in international aid as thousands of his people died.

The latest confounding news came last month, when the country's rightful leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, was sent to Insein prison, the holding tank and interrogation centre for an estimated 2,000 of Myanmar's political prisoners. Her 13 years of house arrest have not been enough, apparently; the regime needs to punish her some more.

• Little Daughter: A Memoir of Survival in Burma and the West, by Zoya Phan with Damien Lewis, Viking Canada, 330 pages, $32

The United Nations and many heads of state have protested against Suu Kyi's imprisonment. Though the Nobel Peace Prize laureate remains Myanmar's most famous political figure, her story of sacrifice and fierce dedication to the democracy movement is only one of thousands of stories that constitute the mostly unwritten history of modern Myanmar. Writers inside the country cannot publish such accounts unless they are willing to face long prison sentences; writers who have left Myanmar contend with the challenges of attaining legal immigrant status and learning a new language. Immigrants trying to stay afloat rarely have time to write books.

Taking that reality into consideration, Little Daughter: A Memoir of Survival in Burma and the West is a miracle powerfully and neatly contained in book form. Written by a 28-year-old Karen woman who spent years of her childhood as a refugee in camps in Thailand, it is a compelling read: suspenseful, illuminating, filled with as many sweet moments as it is with searing descriptions of the civil war that has shattered the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

When the Myanmarese military attacked their village, Zoya's mother gathered her young children and ran with them into the forest, dodging falling mortar shells and machine-gun fire. They and other survivors travelled for weeks through the jungle, until they reached a refugee camp in Thailand that was more an enclosed prison camp than a place of refuge. When the camp was attacked by Myanmarese soldiers, who crossed the border, hundreds of shelters were burned to the ground. This book is also a miracle simply because young Zoya Phan lived to write it.

“ Little Daughter is an important contribution to the growing body of war-child literature ”

Little Daughter is not a literary memoir; the language is mostly plain and sturdy, with flashes of grace and brightness – and a few unfortunate clichés. The lack of artifice and artfulness serves the book well. As I read, I was repeatedly struck by the fact that a good story simply and clearly told is always a testament to the essential power of The Word.

I've been thinking and writing about Myanmar and the Thai-Myanmarese border area for years; people have told me about their experiences in the refugee camps, in the military camps, under fire at the front line. Yet reading Little Daughter was like hearing it all for the first time, and being deeply moved anew. Zoya Phan and her able co-writer, Damien Lewis, lucidly describe the realities she has lived through: Refugee girl hounded by fear, hunger, depression and, sometimes, abusive Thai soldiers; teenager desperate to escape the refugee camp and get an education, though such a dream seems impossible; young woman on scholarship in the chaos of Bangkok; illegal alien in Britain, using a fake passport to continue her studies even as she grows more determined to find a way to help her people; protester at a rally in London who unexpectedly addresses the crowd, and the BBC – and discovers she has her father's gift for captivating an audience. (For post-book-review proof, catch her on YouTube speaking to the British Conservative Party.)

The first quarter of Little Daughter is a primer on Karen culture, language and humour; it evokes a mischievousness and wit that seem quintessentially Karen. It also shows how the young Zoya and her siblings slowly grow into the knowledge that, despite their idyllic day-to-day life, their people are at war with the powerful Myanmarese military machine. “Is the fighting far away?” she asks her parents when a dead slave porter is found floating in the nearby river, when wounded and dead soldiers are carried through their village, when the sound of the exploding mortars becomes audible.

Little Daughter is an important contribution to the growing body of war-child literature. It compellingly apprehends the child's experience of political unrest and the unbelievable-but-must-be-believed shock of violence, and how the trauma of that violence reverberates through the lives of children, the adults they become and the communities they belong to.

For Zoya Phan, as for generations of Karen children, the fighting was never far enough away. The conflict between the Karen and successive oppressive military regimes is the longest-running civil war in the world, with the Karen people making claims for political autonomy, guaranteed cultural preservation and ancestral territories, and the Myanmarese military refusing to negotiate without a total arms surrender. Phan and Lewis do a good job of weaving some of these historical complexities into the narrative. What could have descended into over-simplified propaganda for the Karen cause is instead a balanced, realistic account of life as it has been and is still experienced by hundreds of thousands of ethnic peoples in Myanmar.

In the past 20 years, grave human-rights abuses against the ethnic peoples have become increasingly widespread. Slave labour, rape campaigns, repeated attacks on villages and on refugee camps, extreme methods of torture, including the torture of children, crop burnings that ensure severe malnutrition, sometimes starvation – all are tactics used by the Myanmarese military to try to destroy the Karen people and their resistance army.

Phan lived through and witnessed many of these crimes herself, but for the most part she leaves the human-rights reports in their depressingly large numbers to detail the worst of the atrocities. She wisely focuses on her own experiences and on those of her family. Therein lies the real power of this memoir: Zoya Phan knows that to tell the true story is a crucial political act. Even in the age of cyberspace, the book is still a quiet battleground where history itself begins to change.

Karen Connelly's memoir Burmese Lessons: A Love Story will be published in the fall.