Pick a Colour

Tender and funny . . . With a poet’s power to help us see anew, Thammavongsa illuminates the humour and joy of this workaday life, exchanging class clichés for the glow of dignity and the human mystery

TLS, Books of the Year

The author of the short-story collection How to Pronounce Knife returns with a knockout first novel . . . Thammavongsa’s minimalism draws a cutting distinction between her savvy characters and the vapid customers who seek manicures, pedicures and facials, flipping scripts on race and class supremacy. The Susans speak truths in a tight, beautiful narrative, striking with a cobra’s coiled energy

Time, The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025

In this exquisite novel, intelligence isn’t inherited through education, status, or privilege – it’s earned. With an inimitable style that decentralizes the English language, crackling wit, and profound confidence, author Souvankham Thammavongsa challenges our biases and insists that we never look at a nail salon, or its workers, the same way again. A master of form and restraint, Thammavongsa once again affirms her place as one of the most vital literary voices of our time

Giller Prize Judges

The immigrant experience and the tension between who we really are and the parts we’re forced to play is deftly explored in this triumphant debut

Mail on Sunday

It would be easy to judge this book by its incredible cover. But the insightful depictions of privilege and the service industry inside are even more vibrant . . . A cracklingly tense novel

People Magazine

The steady-paced, often mordantly funny Pick a Colour explores the immigrant experience, the long tail of trauma, the indignities suffered by low-wage workers and their companion emotions: loneliness, loss and grief

Wall Street Journal

A smart exploration of class and power dynamics

Grazia

Coolly observant . . . With dark humor and brief touches of tenderness, Thammavongsa’s tableau of working-class life casts stock elements – a damaged narrator, a workforce composed entirely of non-white women – in an alienating glow

New Yorker

A shrewd, carefully observed character study . . . The Susans act as a kind of catty Greek chorus . . . Poignant ruminations about love and loss

Prospect

The definition of small but mighty literature . . . Through deft writing and humour, Thammavongsa creates a world rich with individuality and understanding for the lives that surround us but that we may not at first see

San Francisco Chronicle

A slim, gimlet-eyed tale about one woman’s desires in an age of erasure

Boston Globe

Pick a Colour 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, author of Burnt Sugar

Pick a Colour 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 Colour is shockingly intimate. Reading this book left me with an intense desire to touch a stranger’s hands

RITA BULLWINKEL, Booker Prize-longlisted author of Headshot

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 Colour is a knockout: every punch lands

ELEANOR CATTON, author of Birnam Wood

This debut novel is a must for fans (like me) of Thammavongsa's intimate, deliciously tricky short stories. With dry humour 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

ED PARK, Pulitzer Prize finalist author of Same Bed Different Dreams

Tender and intimate yet tense from beginning to end with its blow-by-blow immediacy, Pick a Colour subverts the comforting mundane. Souvankham Thammavongsa’s characters speak to us through the cracks of power hierarchies to elucidate the ordinary potential for violence buzzing under a thin veneer of normal society

PITCHAYA SUDBANTHAD, author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain