Pick a Colour
with Souvankham Thammavongsa
Hosted by Jamie Chai Yun Liew
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.
Canada Reads finalist Jamie Chai Yun Liew hosts a conversation with Giller Prize and O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa about Pick a Colour, her revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labour, and class.
Told over a single day, it introduces readers to a nail salon owner as she toils away for the privileged clients who don’t even know her true name.
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 depth, enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work, but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost, navigating the complicated 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.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.