Pick a Color

Thammavongsa, author of the Giller-winning story collection How to Pronounce Knife, crafts a stunning portrait of a solitary woman. Ning, a “family of one” at 42, lives in a small apartment above her nail salon, which she opened five years earlier, after she was let go by another salon, ostensibly due to her age but perhaps because things got too complicated with one of the owners, Rachel (“I don’t want to grow old with you,” Rachel told her after 12 years of working together). Though Ning avoids getting too close to her employees, she enjoys bantering with them, exchanging bawdy and sometimes macabre jokes in their unnamed Tai language about their unsuspecting English-speaking clients (“We ought to take him to the back room.... Cut him up, you know,” says one of her employees after a client asks for a happy ending). Ning’s reflections on her long-ago stint as an amateur boxer hint at the source of the novel’s somber tone, as she remembers putting an opponent in a coma, but Thammavongsa offers no easy answers to the cause of Ning’s torment. Instead, she invites the reader to consider the barbed perspective of a woman on the outside looking in. Readers won’t easily forget this deeply intelligent narrative. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Sept.)