Bangkok Wakes to Rain

Author/Guide: Pitchaya Sudbanthad

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: Places remember us…

ISBN: 978-1473677258
Genre: Dystopian, Fantasy/Sci Fi

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What you need to know before your trail

In the restless city of Bangkok, there is a house.

Over the last two centuries, it has played host to longings and losses past, present, and future, and has witnessed lives shaped by upheaval, memory and the lure of home.

A nineteenth-century missionary pines for the comforts of New England, even as he finds the vibrant foreign chaos of Siam increasingly difficult to resist. A jazz pianist is summoned in the 1970s to conjure music that will pacify resident spirits, even as he’s haunted by ghosts of his former life. A young woman in a time much like our own gives swimming lessons in the luxury condos that have eclipsed the old house, trying to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in the submerged Bangkok of the future, a band of savvy teenagers guides tourists and former residents past waterlogged landmarks, selling them tissues to wipe their tears for places they themselves do not remember.

Time collapses as their stories collide and converge, linked by blood, memory, yearning, chance, and the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibian, ever-morphing city itself.

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Travel Guide

Travel across Bangkok through the ages BookTrail style

An intoxicating collage of lives intersecting around a building in Bangkok.

This is a story of Bangkok in all of its forms. From a bustling city to one underwater. The descriptions of Bangkok comes across loud and clear on every page. You can hear it, feel it and smell it in the food, the water, the air and the noise of life itself.

The entire city is one big location and the changing lifestyle over time, the government and its politics are a major source of information over the years.

As you read, you get to time travel through different times from the 19th century to a time many years in the future. This is the dystopian time of the novel where the city is now submerged under water. The rain is sadness and the stories merge together to perform a dance, a show like the water droplets on a window pane.

Water is the key:

“I swallowed, not knowing what I drank, medicine or poison; I only knew that I was thirsty. With every drop, I drew in the spirit of oxen and snakes, great jungle beasts ran inside me, growling. I tasted dirt and rubies and thousands of years of rain.”