Pick a Color

A Novel

De: Souvankham Thammavongsa

Narrado por: Zoe Doyle

From Giller Prize and O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa comes a revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labor, and class, an intimate and sharply written book following a nail salon owner as she toils away for the privileged clients who don't even know her true name.

“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.'"

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 complexity. 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 complex 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 Color confirms Souvankham Thammavongsa's place as literature's premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.

©2025 Souvankham Thammavongsa (P)2025 Little, Brown & Company

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Pick a Color 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 Susan's Nail Salon. The world of Pick a Color is shockingly intimate. Reading this book left me with an intense desire to touch a stranger's hands."—Rita Bullwinkle, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Headshot

“This debut novel is a must for fans (like me) of Thammavongsa's intimate, deliciously tricky short stories. With dry humor 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…When Thammavongsa writes, I read!”—Ed Park, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Same Bed Different Dreams

“Pick a Color 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 couldn’t help but feel her narrator is a high priestess for this moment.”—Avni Doshi, Booker shortlisted author of Burnt Sugar

“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 Color is a knockout: every punch lands.”—Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood

Deep and powerful

An exceptionally deep and powerful look into the thoughts of a character who expects to be ignored. Very well performed, this may be one that is actually better on Audible. Thanks again for the great review, NPR.

Unique insight into the nail salon business

Provides interesting insights into the workplace culture of nail salon workers. Disconcerting to learn how much disdain they have for their customers.
But there wasn’t much of a plot and at the end I did not care about any of the characters.

the main character.

It is a wonderfully sad story of an almost middle aged nail salon owner. I will nit say more. it is a book of 1 person who has so much more, you want to get to know her. I feel as if you are not allowed to really know her soul,
and that is ok. It just leaves you feeling "I want more".