We welcome the rainy season with this prescient novel for March’s Climate Read by Writer’s Rebel NYC member, Pitchaya Sudbanthad. This book is hailed as “ambitious and sweeping” (Esquire) and “a remarkable debut” (Financial Times) with a narrative that “recreates the experience of living in Thailand’s aqueous climate so viscerally that you can feel the water rising around your ankles.” From psudbanthad.com
Bonnie Tsui, the author of our December Climate Reads book Why We Swim, moderated this discussion with writer and environmentalist Amy Brady on March 23.
Missed the live event? Watch the video!
Bangkok Wakes to Rain
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.
Praise for Bangkok Wakes to Rain
Named a best book of 2019 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Paste, and Kirkus.
FINALIST for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Casa delle Letterature Bridge Book Award, and the Edward Stanford Award.
“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
Bonnie Tsui is a longtime contributor to The New York Times and the author of AMERICAN CHINATOWN, a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller that won the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Her new book, WHY WE SWIM, was published in April 2020; it was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a TIME Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020, an NPR Best Book of 2020, and a Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe bestseller. Her first children’s book, SARAH & THE BIG WAVE, about the first woman to surf Mavericks, will be published in May 2021. She lives, swims, and surfs in the Bay Area. www.bonnietsui.com
Amy Brady is a columnist for Literary Hub and co-editor of House on Fire: Dispatches from a Climate-Changed World, forthcoming from Catapult. Her writing on art, culture, and climate change has appeared in O, the Oprah magazine, The New Republic, The Village Voice, Slate, The Houston Chronicle, and other places. She holds a PhD in literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has won awards from the National Science Foundation, the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, and the Library of Congress.
Pitchaya Sudbanthad grew up in Thailand, Saudi Arabia, and the American South. He’s a contributing writer at The Morning News and has received fellowships in fiction writing from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the MacDowell Colony. From penguinrandomhouse.com.
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