Description

Bangkok, 1980. As the decades pass, figures fall in and out of the relentless city: Pea and Nam, who arrive in search of a better life; a Thai Elvis impersonator and his only daughter, Pinky; Benz, Tintin and Big, a brotherhood of orphaned strayboys; Rick, the white American patriarch who abandons his Thai family when the going gets tough; Hasmah, whose bloody, hidden work is driven by secessionist rage. Sex tourism, Buddhist cults, gambling rings and skin-whitening routines threaten to take over a city reeling from financial crisis – in a nation constantly reinventing itself, anything can happen…

Publisher Review

An honest, crystalline depiction of what urbanization has done to complicate and erode human life. Bangkok is the true star here, a modern city at the center of a tale as old as civilization itself. Every brightly lit kingdom has an underbelly. * NEW YORK TIMES, EDITORS’ CHOICE * Welcome Me to the Kingdom is a heady, delicately woven collection of stories, full of glitter and grime and surprising sweetness. Mai Nardone explores the fraught relationship between duty and desire, and how this conflict festers in Bangkok’s high-end restaurants and school playgrounds as much as its nightclubs and street kitchens. * Cathy Thomas, author of ISLANDERS * Mai Nardone transports us to a Thailand as few of us have seen it: gritty and lush, spangled and crumbling, aching with grit and ecstasy. Luck and want drive these characters across a landscape that pulsates with the rawness of life lived under an unforgiving sun, and Nardone is a writer with an atlas straight to the heart. * C Pam Zhang, author of HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS IS GOLD * Revelatory, unflinching, and gorgeously written . . . Mai Nardone’s debut peers deep into the lives of Bangkok’s street kids, sex workers, sex tourists, and the privileged bicultural, biracial, and often accidental, beneficiaries of colonialism. Rarely does a work portray those clinging to the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder – and those guarding their position at the top – with such grace, nuance, and insight. Welcome Me to the Kingdom should be taught in classrooms everywhere. * Jonathan Escoffery, author of If I Survive You * Astonishing. Relentless. Mai Nardone’s interlocking stories of modern urban Thailand showcase spectacularly riveting settings and characters as they navigate desire, desperation, and survival. * Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face * A kaleidoscopic vision of Thailand as deep as it is broad. Muay Thai fighters, sex workers, family kitchens, territorial volunteer medics: If no one is saved, no one is exactly lost, either. In the precisely detailed lives of his characters, Nardone unearths real truths, both painful and uplifting, and with his singular prose leaves us wanting more. * Kawai Strong Washburn, author of Sharks in the Time of Saviors * Vibrant… The beauty here lies in the granular gradations of class and religious discrimination Nardone illuminates… Nardone expertly and realistically dramatizes the effects of poverty’s vice-like grip. * Booklist STARRED REVIEW * Beautifully written and affecting throughout * Sunday Telegraph *