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Bangkok Wakes to Rain

A Novel

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
"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.
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    • AudioFile Magazine
      Scottish actor Euan Morton adopts a primarily American intonation for Pitchaya Sudbanthad's impressive multilayered evocation of Bangkok past, present, and future. The choice makes sense, as many of the characters are American visitors or Thai expats living in the States. When called upon, Morton's Thai pronunciation is almost always correct. The audiobook comprises short stories that progress in roughly linear fashion from that of a mid-nineteenth-century missionary doctor to one about teenagers in the near-future who guide tourists over and around their sunken city by boat. Morton's smooth, unhurried pace echoes the fluid, aqueous writing that mirrors Bangkok's riverine setting. Also, he doesn't differentiate vocally between humans and spirits, which maintains the flow and otherworldly quality of this unusual and arresting debut novel. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

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