Pick a Color: A Novel

by Souvankham Thammavongsa Narrated by Zoe Doyle

Overview

From Giller Prize and O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa comes a revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labor, and class, an intimate and sharply written book following a nail salon owner as she toils away for the privileged clients who don't even know her true name.

“I live in a world of Susans. I got name tags for everyone who works at this nail salon, and on every one is printed the name 'Susan.'"

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 complexity. A woman enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work, but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost. A woman navigating the complex 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.

Told over a single day with razor-sharp precision and wit, Pick a Color confirms Souvankham Thammavongsa's place as literature's premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"A stylist in a nail salon, Ning is known as 'Susan' to her clients; yet a blazing ambition and inner life propel her in Thammavongsa’s slim, gimlet-eyed tale about one woman’s desires in an age of erasure.”—Boston Globe

“A soulful first novel…It is a delight to immerse oneself in the everyday drama of the salon's 'brightly lit box' with the rhythmic cadence of Thammavongsa's storytelling and the narrative spaces she creates for readers' imaginations to ignite."—Shelf Awareness

“This exceptional novel, honed sharp as cuticle nippers, contains great wit and quick turns, up to the last sentence.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A stunning portrait of a solitary woman… Readers won’t easily forget this deeply intelligent narrative."
 —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[An] insightful and witty first novel…Thammavongsa’s novel beautifully demonstrates her knack for developing strong characterizations. Looking at working women, culture, and relationships, the book portrays a diversity of experience that reminds of the common links of the human condition."—Library Journal

“A razor-sharp portrait of emotional labor and buried longing, cutting through the polish of a nail salon to reveal the quiet truths beneath…Her mastery lies in what’s left unsaid and in the quiet power of a single, cutting sentence.”—Booklist

"Pick a Color is one of the greatest novels I have ever read. In alchemical and captivating prose, this book orbits the steady flows of power and projection that exist between Ning, her employees and her clients. Love, death, joy, abandonment, deception and lust are all at stake in Susan's Nail Salon. The world of Pick a Color is shockingly intimate. Reading this book left me with an intense desire to touch a stranger's hands."
 —Rita Bullwinkle, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Headshot

“This debut novel is a must for fans (like me) of Thammavongsa's intimate, deliciously tricky short stories. With dry humor and a keen eye for class, she's given us a hauntingly good book about the dignity and despair of work: the secret life of nail salons…When Thammavongsa writes, I read!”—Ed Park, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Same Bed Different Dreams

“Pick a Color is a wickedly funny and moving novel by a superbly stylish writer. This is a book about intimacy and alienation, how othering limits our gaze, about the masks we wear, the instincts we hone, and the ways in which we are nonetheless created anew in each encounter. In a world so often drained of ethics and meaning, Souvankham narrows in on the contemporary rituals of our modern-day confessionals—and I couldn’t help but feel her narrator is a high priestess for this moment.”—Avni Doshi, Booker shortlisted author of Burnt Sugar

“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 Color is a knockout: every punch lands.”—Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2025-08-02
A day in the life of a weary, and wary, nail-salon manager in an unspecified North American city, whose past struggles inform her insights about her staff and clients.

At this shop, each nail tech’s badge reads Susan—although their real names include Noi, Annie, and Mai. They all wear their straight black hair at shoulder length, and the 41-year-old manager, Ning, wields scissors if necessary to make her employees almost indistinguishable. “Faces give so much away,” she says at the beginning. “Feelings, especially.” Ning, who during the day is also known as Susan, was once a competitive fighter with a hard-driving coach, Murch. Her lessons about shadowboxing helped her parry endless verbal jabs from her first salon boss, Rachel. Rachel and her brother Raymond extract a great deal of labor and wages from their employees. Ning’s current near-monastic existence outside of work—she lives in a tiny one-room apartment over the salon—is indisputably a reaction to that trauma, even as she glosses over her loneliness and trades jokes with her colleagues: “How many does she seat?” Ning deadpans in their shared language about a woman named Vanessa who asks to be called Van, and all the Susans laugh discreetly, accustomed to pretending they’re not gossiping about the customers. Ning tells stories about clients who include a pro baseball player, a youthful bridal party, and a brittle businesswoman, but in the style of Rachel Cusk, this narrator’s observations tell us even more about her own history, longings, and loneliness. Chapters pass with the rhythm of a broom sweeping the floor, punctuated by the twice-repeated instruction to “pick a color” that greets each person who walks through the door. Suddenly Ning’s keen observations make sense, her way of ensuring she doesn’t succumb to the numb hypnosis of her repetitive and undercompensated work.

This exceptional novel, honed sharp as cuticle nippers, contains great wit and quick turns, up to the last sentence.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940194525317
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	09/30/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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