Bangkok Wakes to Rain -

Pitchaya Sudbanthad

Riverhead Books

2019

352 páginas

11h 44m

ISBN-10: 0525534768

In the center of the most fluid of cities, a house endures two centuries' ebb and flow of change as it plays host to longings and losses past, present, and future. A nineteenth-century missionary doctor pines for the comforts of New England even as he finds the vibrant chaos on the doorstep increasingly difficult to resist. A society woman marries, mothers, and holds court in the house's 1930s heyday, little suspecting she will wind up alone. A jazz pianist is summoned in the 1950s to conjure music to dispel the resident spirits, even as he's haunted by the ghosts of his former life. In the present, 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. 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.