Pick a Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa review – behind the scenes at the nail salon

The Guardian 2 min read 11 hours ago

<p>This impressive novel shows how war, colonialism and migration play out in a small room where everyone’s name tag says Susan</p><p>Pick a Colour, the first novel from Laotian-Canadian poet and short-story&nbsp;writer Souvankham Thammavongsa, takes place over one summer’s day in a nail bar; implicitly in Canada, but it could be in any city. The narrative potential of such businesses, where customers pay for a particular service and expect to receive other kinds of care, has been explored in&nbsp;films and novels set in taxis, hairdressers and, in Katja Oskamp’s Marzahn, Mon&nbsp;Amour, a chiropody clinic. Such settings open rich questions: who has the power, the one who pays or the one who shapes the customer’s body, often with alarmingly sharp implements? How human can such exchanges of cash&nbsp;for care or “beauty” be? What do&nbsp;we buy and what do we sell&nbsp;in these&nbsp;transactions?</p><p>The novel sets out its stall plainly. Narrated by Ning, the salon owner and&nbsp;a retired boxer, the prelude ends, “Looking at the two of us, them sitting on a chair above me, and me down low,&nbsp;you’d think I am not in charge. But I am. I know everything about them, whether or not they tell me.” All&nbsp;first-person narrators are unreliable, and we are implicitly invited to question this assertion. With more certainty at the beginning and less at&nbsp;the end, Ning thinks she knows everything about everyone, including her employees. The workers judge and&nbsp;mock their customers, relying on&nbsp;clients not understanding “our language”. (Which language is not specified, and perhaps doesn’t matter, certainly not to most of the customers.) Seen through Ning’s eyes, everyone is trying to get what they can for as little as possible in a system with small room for humanity.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/oct/13/pick-a-colour-by-souvankham-thammavongsa-r
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