By Stephanie Domet, Frye Correspondent
Book read: Pick a Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Penguin Random House Canada, 2025)
In Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Pick A Colour, the world is concentrated through a single character on a single day in a single location. Ning owns and operates Susan’s, a nail salon on an unnamed street in an unnamed city. A former boxer, Ning is deeply observant—as fixed on the faces, bodies, and desires of her coworkers and clients as she once was on her opponents in the ring. She is also deeply independent, and very much in charge. She lives above the salon, and is the first to arrive each day and the last to leave. She doesn’t have kids or a partner. She is a family of one, she is careful to convey early in the narrative.
The restraint and constraints of the novel are classic Thammavongsa—cautioned that a single day, single narrator, single location novel would be tough to pull off, Thammavongsa has said that next she’ll write a novel that takes place over a single hour, a single minute, a single second. This response is emblematic of both her sense of humour—which is ribboned throughout Pick A Colour, as it is through the stories in her debut collection of short stories, How to Pronounce Knife—and her fighting spirit. Thammavongsa is not a writer who shies away from a challenge. In fact, she rises to them.
On stage at a literary event recently, she relayed two stories. One, about an audition to play the role of Little Red Riding Hood, when she was seven. She didn’t know the story or much about it. Only that she should wear red, and that a wolf would chase her. When the wolf-chase began, she turned and kicked the wolf. The director explained that actors don’t get to choose what happens—the writer decides.
The second story—her publisher wanted a novel from her, to accompany her collection of short stories. After the wild success of How to Pronounce Knife (a best-seller, it won the Giller and the Trillium, and was named a must-read book of 2020 by Time magazine), she was told she didn’t have to write a novel after all—she could keep doing short stories. Her response: “Oh, you think I can’t write a novel?” She’d show them. And so she has.
And what a novel. Pick A Colour is the whole world in a slim volume. Love, lust, language, alienation, intimacy, joy, death, absence—all are present here. As fiercely observant as Ning is, the clients of her salon are not. They fall for Ning’s trick—every woman who works in the salon wears a nametag that says Susan. They have the same haircut, and wear the same outfit. Thammavongsa is working here with classism and racism, and meeting both with sharp insights and sharper humour. Through Ning’s perspective the world is rendered as a place in which everyone is ugly, but Ning and her fellow Susans can work a certain amount of magic—all while discussing, conjecturing about, and often roasting the clients in a language the English-speaking clientele does not understand. The result is a novel that rewards rereading, with much to say about isolation, vulnerability, othering, and how the choices we make shape our lives, whether we know it or not.
Cite this document:
Stephanie Domet
Stephanie Domet is the author of two novels, Homing and Fallsy Downsies, both published by Invisible. She has also co-authored a nonfiction book for intermediate readers titled Amazing Atlantic Canadian Women, published by Nimbus. She is a co-founder and co-executive director of the AfterWords Literary Festival and editor-in-chief of The Dalhousie Review. She teaches creative writing to adults and children from her home in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. She’s probably wearing something she sewed herself.
Souvankham Thammavongsa
