#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • FINALIST FOR THE 2025 GILLER PRIZE

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.

"One of the greatest novels I have ever read." —Rita Bullwinkel
"A knockout: every punch lands." —Eleanor Catton

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.

Shortlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize

"[A] cooly observant novel, by a noted short story writer. . . . With dark humour and brief touches of tenderness, Thammavongsa's tableau of working-class life casts stock elements—a damaged narrator, a workforce composed entirely of nonwhite women—in an alienating glow."—The New Yorker

"[A] superb debut novel. . . . steady-paced, often mordantly funny, Pick a Colour explores the immigrant experience, the long tail of trauma, the indignities suffered by low-wage workers and their companion emotions: loneliness loss and grief." —The Wall Street Journal

“In this exquisite novel, intelligence isn’t inherited through education, status, or privilege—it’s earned. With an inimitable style that decentralizes the English language, crackling wit, and profound confidence, author Souvankham Thammavongsa challenges our biases and insists that we never look at a nail salon, or its workers, the same way again. A master of form and restraint, Thammavongsa once again affirms her place as one of the most vital literary voices of our time.” —2025 Giller Prize Jury (Dionne Irving, Loghan Paylor, Deepa Rajagopalan)

“[A] a highly crafted, layered and clever novel.” —The Guardian

“Pick a Colour, the taut, tricksy novel by Laotian-Canadian writer Souvankham Thammavongsa . . . is a feat of economy. . . . Under 200 pages, [it] punches above its weight. Thammavongsa’s minimalism conveys a range of tones and psychological nuances as she grapples with the stubborn prejudices of class.” —The Washington Post

“[T]he definition of small but mighty literature. . . . Through deft writing and humor, Thammavongsa creates a world rich with individuality and understanding for the lives that surround us but that we may not at first see.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“[A] [k]nockout debut. [Pick A Colour] is a slim but immersive novel.” —The Winnipeg Free Press

“[T]his debut novel . . . centres the perspective of Ning—clever, complicated, a former boxer now working as manicurist—to poke holes in the fragile social veneers that hide uneasy truths about privilege, labour and the immigrant experience.” —Toronto Star, Fall Preview

“Pick a Colour spans a single day of commerce, during which menace, joy, generosity, and loneliness take turns filling the room. It is narrated by the salon owner, Ning, whose matter-of-fact, staccato voice belies a delicate vulnerability.” —The Walrus, The Best Books of Fall 2025

“[D]espite her anonymous exterior . . . [Ning is] an intellectual, a deep thinker and is haunted by the roads not taken.” —CBC, Fall Reading List

“In this quiet but commanding novel, salon owner Ning—a retired boxer—manages the salon with clipped precision while sharing razor-sharp insights and zingers with the other Susans and silently reflecting on her life and losses.” —Chatelaine, Fall 2025 Reading List

“It would be easy to judge this book by its incredible cover. But the insightful depictions of privilege and the service industry inside are even more vibrant. . . . A cracklingly tense novel.” —People Magazine

“Richly observational . . . [Pick a Colour] illuminates a rarely seen slice of life.” —The Times (UK)

“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] certifiable knockout.” —The Irish Examiner

“Sharply observed and viciously funny.” —Marie Claire (UK)

“A confident, ominous novel.” —W Magazine

“A powerful novel that is profoundly of the moment.” —Real Simple

“Pick a Color is another example of all the things that make Thammavongsa’s craft shine: its airtight form, soulful characterization, and the evocative portrayal of the mundane. . . . The novel quietly burns with the power of human love and friendship.” —Electric Literature

“With Pick a Colour, her highly anticipated first novel, Souvankham Thammavongsa provides her readers with a singular guide to harrowing truths about class, loneliness, and the art of self-
preservation.” —Literary Review of Canada

“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)

“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; it also tells a touching and relatable story.” —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

“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

“[Pick a Colour] is a sharp dissection of cultural stereotypes and class disparity, as evoked brilliantly—and, it must be said, extremely humorously—in the ironic distance between the privileged patrons of the salon and much more savvy and perceptive employees.” —Quill and Quire

“Thammavongsa has been very strict with herself in terms of the prose here, with a staccato rhythm, no-nonsense narrative voice and a tone that circles between ennui and contentedness, and it really pays off. Topical themes such as ratings culture and the threat of violence are dealt with through dry wit and short, sharp shocks and the close is all the more affecting for the restraint.” —Shortlist, Autumn Reading List

“[Q]uiet and subtle in all the right ways. [Thammavongsa’s] sly observations turn scenes into the unexpected time and time again.”—Debutiful, September Reading List

“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

“A simple story that will linger with you.” —Nathalie Atkinson, Zoomer