Content warning(s): description of police brutality and climate collapse. Bangkok Wakes to Rain is a wildly imaginative, mesmerizing reading experience from an author at the beginning of what promises to be a thrilling career'- Provided by publisher. (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019) Featured image: photo by Hanny Naibaho on Unsplash. Time collapses as these stories collide and converge, linked by blood, memory, yearning, chance, and the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibian, ever-morphing city itself. And in the post-submergence Bangkok of the future, a band of savvy teenagers guides tourists and former residents past waterlogged, ruined landmarks, selling them tissues to wipe their tears for places they themselves do not remember.

Not long after, a young woman gives swimming lessons in the luxury condos that have eclipsed the old house, trying to outpace the long shadow of her political past. A jazz pianist is summoned in the 1970s to conjure music that will pacify resident spirits, even as he's haunted by ghosts of his former life. A post-war society woman marries, mothers, and holds court, little suspecting the course of her future. A nineteenth-century missionary doctor pines for the comforts of New England even as he finds the vibrant foreign chaos of Siam increasingly difficult to resist. Witness to two centuries' flux in one of the world's most restless cities, a house plays host to longings and losses past, present, and future. 'A house in the center of Bangkok becomes the point of confluence where lives are shaped by upheaval, memory, and the lure of home.

Bangkok wakes to rain