Welcome Me to the Kingdom

Stories

De: Mai Nardone

Narrado por: Melody Butiu, Brian Sounalath, Rachanee Lumayno, Su Ling Chan, Sura Siu, Patrick Lawlor, James Tang

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • An immersive debut set across the temples, slums, and gated estates of late-twentieth century Bangkok, telling the story of three families striving to control their destinies in a merciless, sometimes brutally violent, metropolis.

“Mai Nardone is a writer with an atlas straight to the heart. I did not want to put this book down and neither will you.”—C Pam Zhang, bestselling author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold

LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE

We came with the drought. From the window of the train, the rich brown of the Chao Phraya River marked the turn from the northeast into the central plains. We came for Bangkok on the delta. The thin tributaries that laced the provinces found full current at the capital. And in the city, we’d heard, the wealth was wide and deep.

In 1980, young lovers Pea and Nam arrive in Bangkok in search of a life, and a world, beyond Thailand’s rural outskirts. Thirty days, they promise each other. Thirty days for Pea to find work, for him to put aside his violent and unstable past and take root in this strange new land. But Bangkok does not want for male laborers, especially teenage boys with thick provincial accents, and when time finally runs out on their promise, it’s Nam who ultimately adapts to the capital’s ruthless logic and survives.

Spanning decades and perspectives, seamlessly shifting between the absurd and the tenderhearted, the interwoven stories of Welcome Me to the Kingdom introduce three families—Nam, her American husband, Rick, and their daughter, Lara; Vitat, a Thai Elvis impersonator, and his only daughter, Pinky; and Tintin and Benz, orphans who have adopted each other as brothers—who employ various schemes to lie, betray, and seduce their way to the “good life.”

These disparate citizens of Bangkok orbit each other over the next three decades—sometimes violently, passionately colliding. Through skin-whitening routines, cult conversion, gambling, and sex work, the collection’s characters look for reinvention in a city buckling under the weight of its own modernity.

Wildly imaginative and ambitious, Mai Nardone’s stories reveal the growing discrepancy between Bangkok’s smiling self-image and its ugly underbelly, and, in the process, offer a striking portrait of a city unmade by the whims of global capitalism, in a kingdom caught between this world and the next.

Very Compelling

A very compelling book that keeps your attention with many twists. The audio version is excellent.

A Great Work!

Well-written and beautifully performed. The bold and nuanced narratives in this collection will stick with you long after reading.

Can’t even finish it

I don’t know why but I just don’t like this book. The stories are disjointed and hard to connect to. I was excited that this was based in Thailand and while there are insights into the cultural structures of the country, I just can’t get into this book. One of the male narrators is really grating and obnoxious for me… I am only 2/3 done and I am giving up. I wish I had used my credit for something else.