An immensely talented new voice in literary fiction.
Orbiting the devastating financial crisis of 1997, these interwoven stories introduce us to three families--a Thai Elvis impersonator and his only daughter, a family abandoned by their white American patriarch, and an adoptive brotherhood of orphaned boys--who employ various schemes and strategies to conceal, betray, lie, and seduce their way to achieving the "good" life.
Wildly imaginative and ambitious, Mai Nardone's stories capture the growing discrepancy between Thailand's smiling self-image and its ugly obverse. Through skin-whitening routines, cult conversion, Elvis costumery, gambling, and sex work, the collection's characters look for reinvention in a city unmade by a financial crisis, in a kingdom caught between this world and the next.
“A writer with an atlas straight to the heart.” ? C Pam Zhang, author of HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS IS GOLD