Pick a Colour: A Novel

From Giller Prize and O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa comes a revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labour, 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.

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

SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA is the author of four poetry books and the short story collection How to Pronounce Knife, winner of the 2020 Giller Prize and 2021 Trillium Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN America Open Book Award. Her stories have won an O. Henry Award and appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Granta, and NOON. She has also written book reviews for The New York Times, and edited the anthologies Best Canadian Poetry (2021) and The Griffin Poetry Prize (2021). Born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, she was raised and educated in Toronto.

ISBN: 9781039058453
Format: Hardback
Pages: 192
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: September 30, 2025

“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.” —Eleanor Catton, Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries

"Pick a Colour 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 Colour is shockingly intimate. Reading this book left me with an intense desire to touch a stranger's hands." —Rita Bullwinkel, Pulitzer Prize finalist author of Headshot

“Pick a Colour 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 Prize shortlisted author of Burnt Sugar

"This debut novel is a must for fans (like me) of Thammavongsa's intimate, deliciously tricky short stories. With dry humour 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." —Ed Park, Pulitzer Prize finalist author of Same Bed Different Dreams

"Tender and intimate yet tense from beginning to end with its blow-by-blow immediacy, Pick a Colour subverts the comforting mundane. Souvankham Thammavongsa’s characters speak to us through the cracks of power hierarchies to elucidate the ordinary potential for violence buzzing under a thin veneer of normal society." —Pitchaya Sudbanthad, author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain