Welcome Me to the Kingdom Audiobook Libro.fm

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS CHOICE An immersive debut set across the temples slums and gated estates of latetwentieth 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 youC Pam Zhang bestselling author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold

LONGLISTED FOR THEPEN/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 wed 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 Thailands 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 its Nam who ultimately adapts to the capitals 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 familiesNam 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 brotherswho 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 decadessometimes violently passionately colliding Through skinwhitening routines cult conversion gambling and sex work the collections characters look for reinvention in a city buckling under the weight of its own modernity

Wildly imaginative and ambitious Mai Nardones stories reveal the growing discrepancy between Bangkoks smiling selfimage 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