Bangkok Wakes to Rain

A Novel

By: Pitchaya Sudbanthad

Narrated by: Euan Morton

"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 bestselling author of Exit West

A missionary doctor pines for his native New England even as he succumbs to the vibrant chaos of nineteenth-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.

Blown away

I loved this book. I'm definitely partial to literary fiction. This was beautifully written and profound. I think the connection between these people was unusual and special.

Pretty Good!

The book overall is well written and the stories are fine. The last portion of the book seems to just kind of meander until the book just ends. Most of the vignettes are good and if you like seeing how stories fit together for a greater picture, the book does an almost great job of that. Nothing about Clyde seems to fit or matter, but maybe as the farang character that’s kind of a meta commentary. Everything else? Good to great.

Mind is Blown

You’re thrown right in, and it can be hard to get your bearings at first. If you ever do. But for every connection the reader makes, you feel more and more like you’re getting it even as everything moves from a plane we know and understand to a distant, dystopic future. Absolutely unique and incredible piece of writing.

I took another reviewer’s advice to go back and listen to the first chapter again once finished, and I can’t recommend enough.

Fragmented

Sad stories of the various characters. Difficult to follow the changing time line of the characters. Then the SF part felt out of place and strange.

Maybe the worst narration ever

I understand it’s a supremely difficult book for narrators. English accents, Thai accents and names, American accents, gay, straight people, but the monotone deeply masculine American narrator misses every subtlety this book consists of.
I don’t blame the narrator but the producer for casting such an unsuitable voice for such a brilliant book