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Bangkok Wakes to Rain
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Euan Morton
- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
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Bangkok Wakes to Rain
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Publisher's Summary
"Recreates the experience of living in Thailand's aqueous climate so viscerally that you can feel the water rising around your ankles." (Ron Charles, Washington Post)
"Important, ambitious, and accomplished." (Mohsin Hamid, New York Times best-selling author of Exit West)
A missionary doctor pines for his native New England even as he succumbs to the vibrant chaos of 19th-century Siam. A post-World War II society woman marries, mothers, and holds court, little suspecting her solitary fate. A jazz pianist in the age of rock, haunted by his own ghosts, is summoned to appease the house's resident spirits. In the present, a young woman tries to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in a New Krungthep yet to come, savvy teenagers row tourists past landmarks of the drowned old city they themselves do not remember. Time collapses as these lives collide and converge, linked by the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibious, ever-morphing capital itself. Bangkok Wakes to Rain is an elegy for what time erases and a love song to all that persists, yearning, into the unknowable future.
What the critics say
Named a Best Book of 2019 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Paste, and Kirkus
"[An examination of] hidden, overlooked spaces, where ghosts and spirits and discarded dreams orbit, even as people try to outpace the past...[stories] intersect and build on one another, like banana leaves woven to make a floating offering for the water spirits.... Bangkok is changing too fast, shedding layers of its history like the skins of a snake. Yet the city retains its allure, and the quest to return is like some animal." (New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice)
"Fluid in its structure and aqueous in its themes, the novel vividly evokes the teeming, sweltering city." (The New Yorker)
"Captures the nation’s lush history in all its turbulence and resilience...flowing gracefully from historical fiction to contemporary realism to science fiction... Entrancing... Sudbanthad’s narrative is not just a tribute to his home, it’s an act of resistance against the city’s mildew and amnesia…a way of preserving what is otherwise inscribed only on the liquid surface of memory." (Washington Post)
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What listeners say about Bangkok Wakes to Rain
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Gloria Smith
- 2021-03-03
Meandering Tale set in Exotic Bangkok
I read this thru my book club and only 3members managed to finish this ambitious book. The author uses characters thru time that dwell in and around an old manor home in the city that later is a condo development in the modern city. He asks a lot of his reader to travel thru time connecting the dots and perhaps even characters over time. The plot isn’t linear but more like a Mandela that turns thru time. This is challenging for the reader but rewarding for the ones that stick with it until the layers frame the experience. The result is a fine book - but one for the few and not the many.
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