Pick a Colour: The electrifying new novel from the author of How to Pronounce Knife

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From Giller Prize and O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa comes a revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labor, and class.

'I live in a world of Susans. I got name tags for everyone who works at this nail salon, and on every one is printed the name "Susan".'

One of the greatest novels I have ever read RITA BULWINKELL
Wickedly funny and moving AVNI DOSHI
A knockout: every punch lands ELEANOR CATTON

Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. On this summer's day, much like any other, the Susans buff and clip and polish and tweeze. They listen and smile and nod. But beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous intellect and profound depth. A woman enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work, but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost. A woman navigating the complicated power dynamics among her fellow Susans, whose greatest fears and desires lie just behind the gossip they exchange.

As the day's work grinds on, the friction between Ning's two identities as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning.

Told over a single day with razor-sharp precision and wit, Pick a Colour confirms Souvankham Thammavongsa's place as literature's premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.

'Hauntingly good' ED PARK
Subverts the comforting mundane PITCHAYA SUDBANTHAD
A master over the sentence DAISY JOHNSON

Reader Reviews:
'Unlike anything I've read before, a talent to watch' (5-star review)
'The prose was liquid gold' (5-star review)
'I was devastated to finish it so soon' (5-star review)

Reviews

Pick a Colour is a wickedly funny and moving novel by a superbly stylish writer. This is a book about intimacy and alienation, how othering limits our gaze, about the masks we wear, the instincts we hone, and the ways in which we are nonetheless created anew in each encounter. In a world so often drained of ethics and meaning, Souvankham narrows in on the contemporary rituals of our modern day confessionals and I couldnt help but feel her narrator is a high priestess for this moment -- AVNI DOSHI, author of Burnt Sugar
Pick a Colour is one of the greatest novels I have ever read. In alchemical and captivating prose, this book orbits the steady flows of power and projection that exist between Ning, her employees and her clients. Love, death, joy, abandonment, deception and lust are all at stake in Susans Nail Salon. The world of Pick a Colour is shockingly intimate. Reading this book left me with an intense desire to touch a strangers hands -- RITA BULLWINKEL, Booker Prize-longlisted author of Headshot
Only as masterful an ironist as Souvankham Thammavongsa could have pulled this off: a work of urgent and impassioned solidarity that is also a defiant, even pugnacious, assertion of narrative autonomy and technical control. Pick a Colour is a knockout: every punch lands -- ELEANOR CATTON, author of Birnam Wood
This debut novel is a must for fans (like me) of Thammavongsa's intimate, deliciously tricky short stories. With dry humour and a keen eye for class, she's given us a hauntingly good book about the dignity and despair of work: the secret life of nail salons -- ED PARK, Pulitzer Prize finalist author of Same Bed Different Dreams
Tender and intimate yet tense from beginning to end with its blow-by-blow immediacy, Pick a Colour subverts the comforting mundane. Souvankham Thammavongsas characters speak to us through the cracks of power hierarchies to elucidate the ordinary potential for violence buzzing under a thin veneer of normal society -- PITCHAYA SUDBANTHAD, author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain

Author Bio

Souvankham Thammavongsas fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, the Paris Review and more. Her collection of short stories, How to Pronounce Knife, won the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2021 Trillium Book Award, and her poetry has won numerous prizes. Born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, she was raised and educated in Toronto. Pick a Colour is her first novel.