**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.
