A dark ride through the seedy belly of Bangkok

WELCOME ME TO THE KINGDOM

by Mai Nardone

288pp, Atlantic, £12.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £14.99, ebook £10.27

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This debut novel by Thai-American Mai Nardone may feature bustling Bangkok and the beaches of Patong, but it is the antithesis of an effusive travel ad. Welcome Me to the Kingdom is structured as a series of vignettes that intersect to depict characters and their relationships over a span of five generations. In the opening pages we are thrust into the streets of the Thai capital, where Pea and Nam – orphans raised in a Buddhist temple in Udon Thani – have newly arrived, like so many others from the provinces, seeking work and a reprieve from the droughts and poverty ravaging their towns.

Though Pea promises he will take care of Nam, his string of transient, low-paid labouring jobs inevitably trails off. Nam starts to work in a Bangkok bar, tasked with seducing old, drunken white men. Pea is enraged but Nam is resigned: she does what she must to survive.

In these stories, Nam is both a central and peripheral character, from her convenient marriage to the abortion into which she is pressured, and the appearance of her Thai-American daughter Lara, who cannot comprehend her mother’s sacrifices. As each story cuts to the next, a new landscape opens, drawing us into a different phase of the prior character’s life, so that we can piece together more of who they are.

Nardone’s third-personal voice often prevents us from viewing the world through the perspective of his ill-fated characters. Like tourists, we can only observe as they struggle and stumble determinedly on in a Bangkok where cinemas and dance clubs are destroyed to make way for McDonald’s branches and parking lots. The men are proud, violent and emotionally manipulative: doomed-to-fail Pea; overweight and lonely American divorcé Rick; Ba, whose childhood in the Chinese city of Chaozhou has failed to prepare him for nearpoverty in Bangkok with the wife and daughters he daily assaults.

Yet those resilient, determined women redeem the cruelty in Nardone’s book. Ping studies relentlessly for a better life; Nam bears her daily disparagement in order to escape poverty; Hasmah, a Muslim abortionist, provides her services despite the risks to her life and despite the pain of losing her own child when she was violently beaten by Buddhist police.

is not an easy read, but it is beautifully written and affecting throughout.