Pick a Color, Souvankham Thammavongsa
Pick a Color, Souvankham Thammavongsa
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Pick a Color
A Novel

Author: Souvankham Thammavongsa

Narrator: Zoe Doyle

Unabridged: 4 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/30/2025

Synopsis

From O. Henry Award winner and two-time Giller Prize winner Souvankham Thammavongsa comes a revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labor, and class, an intimate and sharply written book following a nail salon owner as she toils away for the privileged clients who don't even know her true name.“I live in a world of Susans. I got name tags for everyone who works at this nail salon, and on every one is printed the name 'Susan'." Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. On this summer's day, much like any other, the Susans buff and clip and polish and tweeze. They listen and smile and nod. But beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous intellect and profound complexity. A woman enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work, but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost. A woman navigating the complex power dynamics among her fellow Susans, whose greatest fears and desires lie just behind the gossip they exchange. As the day's work grinds on, the friction between Ning's two identities—as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances—will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning. Told over a single day with razor-sharp precision and wit, Pick a Color confirms Souvankham Thammavongsa's place as literature's premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms. Winner of the Giller Prize
A USA Today bestseller

Reviews

Goodreads review by emma on October 25, 2025

this is the inverse of my new favorite trend (authors writing a great novel and then a sophomore short story collection) (review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)......more

Goodreads review by Mai on October 03, 2025

From the cover, to the subject matter, to the Southeast Asian rep, I knew this would hit. Even though I'm Vietnamese American and Souvankham is Laotian Canadian, there is something so deeply intrinsic in our shared stories. This isn't a memoir. And it doesn't have to be. But the familiarity of nail s......more

Goodreads review by Ian on August 22, 2025

A poignant and insightful character study, and a gentle exploration of the immigrant experience. Full of warmth, humour, and perceptive observations of human behaviour and identity, while also exploring isolation and otherness. Ning has several roles: she is boss and mentor in her small nail bar, she......more

Goodreads review by Jeanie ~ MyFairytaleLibrary on May 31, 2025

I truly enjoyed this sometimes funny and sometimes heartbreaking look at a day in the life of a shop owner. If you’ve ever had a pedicure and the workers are speaking in a language you don’t speak and they are laughing, they’re likely laughing at you! Ning works hard and her shop is her whole life.......more

Goodreads review by Liz on September 06, 2025

Very sharp commentary on visibility, or rather, invisibility......more

Quotes

"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

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