Welcome Me To The Kingdom Stories

Description: NEW YORK Times Editors Choice An immersive debut set across the temples slums and gated estates of late - twentieth century Bangkok telling the story of three families striving to control their destinies in a merciless sometimes brutally violent metropolis. Mai Nardone is a writer with an atlas straight to the heart. I did not want to put this book down and neither will you. C Pam Zhang bestselling author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold We came with the drought. From the window of the train the rich brown of the Chao Phraya River marked the turn from the northeast into the central plains. We came for Bangkok on the delta. The thin tributaries that laced the provinces found full current at the capital. And in the city we d heard the wealth was wide and deep. In 1980, young lovers Pea and Nam arrive in Bangkok in search of a life and a world beyond Thailand's rural outskirts. Thirty days they promise each other. Thirty days for Pea to find work for him to put aside his violent and unstable past and take root in this strange new land. But Bangkok does not want for male laborers especially teenage boys with thick provincial accents and when time finally runs out on their promise it's Nam who ultimately adapts to the capital's ruthless logic and survives. Spanning decades and perspectives seamlessly shifting between the absurd and the tenderhearted the interwoven stories of Welcome Me to the Kingdom introduce three families Nam her American husband Rick and their daughter Lara; Vitat a Thai Elvis impersonator and his only daughter Pinky; and Tintin and Benz orphans who have adopted each other as brothers who employ various schemes to lie betray and seduce their way to the good life. These disparate citizens of Bangkok orbit each other over the next three decades sometimes violently passionately colliding. Through skin - whitening routines cult conversion gambling and sex work the collection's characters look for reinvention in a city buckling under the weight of its own modernity. Wildly imaginative and ambitious Mai Nardone's stories reveal the growing discrepancy between Bangkok's smiling self - image and its ugly underbelly and in the process offer a striking portrait of a city unmade by the whims of global capitalism in a kingdom caught between this world and the next.
Title: Welcome Me To The Kingdom Stories
Barcode: 9780593498187
Publication Date: 2/14/2023