Pick a Color

"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