"Recreates the experience of living in Thailand's aqueous climate so viscerally that you can feel the water rising around your ankles." —Ron Charles, Washington Post
"Important, ambitious, and accomplished." —Mohsin Hamid, New York Times bestselling author of Exit West
A missionary doctor pines for his native New England even as he succumbs to the vibrant chaos of nineteenth-century Siam. A post-World War II society woman marries, mothers, and holds court, little suspecting her solitary fate. A jazz pianist in the age of rock, haunted by his own ghosts, is summoned to appease the house's resident spirits. In the present, a young woman tries to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in a New Krungthep yet to come, savvy teenagers row tourists past landmarks of the drowned old city they themselves do not remember. Time collapses as these lives collide and converge, linked by the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibious, ever-morphing capital itself. Bangkok Wakes to Rain is an elegy for what time erases and a love song to all that persists, yearning, into the unknowable future.
Genre: Historical
"Important, ambitious, and accomplished." —Mohsin Hamid, New York Times bestselling author of Exit West
A missionary doctor pines for his native New England even as he succumbs to the vibrant chaos of nineteenth-century Siam. A post-World War II society woman marries, mothers, and holds court, little suspecting her solitary fate. A jazz pianist in the age of rock, haunted by his own ghosts, is summoned to appease the house's resident spirits. In the present, a young woman tries to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in a New Krungthep yet to come, savvy teenagers row tourists past landmarks of the drowned old city they themselves do not remember. Time collapses as these lives collide and converge, linked by the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibious, ever-morphing capital itself. Bangkok Wakes to Rain is an elegy for what time erases and a love song to all that persists, yearning, into the unknowable future.
Genre: Historical
Praise for this book
"A bold and tender novel about the unforgivable and the unforgiven, and how to live past what you thought you could not survive. Sudbanthad arrives to us already a masterful innovator of the form." - Alexander Chee
"An important, ambitious, and accomplished novel. Sudbanthad deftly sweeps us up in a tale that paints a twin portrait: of a megacity like those so many of us call home and of a world where sanctuary is increasingly hard to come by." - Mohsin Hamid
"Moves with an elegant restlessness that seems to match the city's own. Reading this book feels like waking to a singular and important new voice." - Rajesh Parameswaran
"Beautifully textured and rich with a sense of place . . . compellingly captures not only the long arcs of these lives - but also the smallest moments, and how those moments linger in memory, how they haunt." - Karen Thompson Walker
"Gorgeously polyphonic and saturated in the senses, Bangkok Wakes to Rain brims with a wistful and gripping energy. Sudbanthad carries us through time and space with a magician's hand, with a visionary's eye - he brilliantly sounds the resonant pulse of the capital city, of his characters' lives. This wise and far-reaching meditation on home will sink into your bones." - Claire Vaye Watkins
"An important, ambitious, and accomplished novel. Sudbanthad deftly sweeps us up in a tale that paints a twin portrait: of a megacity like those so many of us call home and of a world where sanctuary is increasingly hard to come by." - Mohsin Hamid
"Moves with an elegant restlessness that seems to match the city's own. Reading this book feels like waking to a singular and important new voice." - Rajesh Parameswaran
"Beautifully textured and rich with a sense of place . . . compellingly captures not only the long arcs of these lives - but also the smallest moments, and how those moments linger in memory, how they haunt." - Karen Thompson Walker
"Gorgeously polyphonic and saturated in the senses, Bangkok Wakes to Rain brims with a wistful and gripping energy. Sudbanthad carries us through time and space with a magician's hand, with a visionary's eye - he brilliantly sounds the resonant pulse of the capital city, of his characters' lives. This wise and far-reaching meditation on home will sink into your bones." - Claire Vaye Watkins
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