This month, we’re attending to know the workers of a fictional North American nail salon and a Korean analysis heart for haunted objects.
Choose a Colour: A Novel
Souvankham Thammavongsa (Little, Brown and Firm, 192 pp., $28, September 2025)
This month, we’re attending to know the workers of a fictional North American nail salon and a Korean analysis heart for haunted objects.
Choose a Colour: A Novel
Souvankham Thammavongsa (Little, Brown and Firm, 192 pp., $28, September 2025)
If Lao Canadian author Souvankham Thammavongsa’s debut novel have been a play, it could be a comparatively easy manufacturing. Choose a Colour takes place over the course of someday at a nail salon that’s presumably in a Canadian or U.S. metropolitan space and incorporates a small solid of characters—no set or costume adjustments required. In opposition to this fundamental backdrop, the nail technicians make observations about race, class, and labor. The salon turns into a laboratory for them to push the bounds of deceptively inflexible North American social norms.
The protagonist and narrator of Choose a Colour is Ning, a 41-year-old retired boxer who’s now the proprietor of a nail salon referred to as Susan’s. Though Ning’s workers have their very own names—Annie, Mai, and Noi—all 4 of them put on identify tags that merely learn “Susan.” (“None of our shoppers discover,” says Ning.) She treats the salon like a boxing ring, guided by the work ethic that her coach drilled into her: “Don’t you go searching for their pity. Pity don’t pay.”
Ning seems to have endured previous hardship. For unspecified causes, she is lacking her left ring finger. However Ning makes the perfect of her 9 remaining digits. She is proudly single and figures that she is going to by no means must accommodate a marriage band anyway. (“I’m alone as a result of I need to be,” she says.) Having a spot between her center and pinkie fingers additionally makes Ning a greater technician: There’s “more room to perch a shopper’s toe or fingernail to color.”
The juxtaposition between Ning’s rugged palms and those who she buffs and oils varieties the premise for Choose a Colour’s scrutiny of interclass dynamics. Lots of Ning’s shoppers don’t even notice that she is lacking a finger. “To note that, you need to be me,” Ning says throughout one interplay with a shopper. “She is aware of the nail shade she needs, her mates, the place to take a seat, the place to pay. She even notices the road exterior. The time. However not me.”
To counterbalance the rudeness, entitlement, indifference, and occasional sexual harassment that they encounter, Ning and the Susans gossip all through the day in “our language.” The technicians supply crude stay commentary in regards to the six-figure salaries, non-public faculty tuition, and maybe-cheating husbands that unsuspecting shoppers ramble about in English. “They arrive for the speak,” Ning says. “And also you’d be shocked what individuals let you know once they assume you’re a stranger and they’re by no means going to see you once more.”
Ning makes enjoyable of shoppers she thinks have humorous names, resembling a lady named Eileen. (“Eye-lean. It makes me consider my optometrist.”) Buyer Vanessa, who goes by Van, just isn’t spared both. (“I didn’t assume anybody wished to be referred to as something like a automobile.”) Ning additionally has opinions on the concept of “self-care” that brings so many individuals into her salon: “I don’t like that time period,” she says. “It’s extra like my-care. I’m the one sitting right here, doing all of the caring.”
Thammavongsa by no means reveals which language Ning and her colleagues communicate, or the place precisely the nail salon is situated. She solely drops delicate hints, mentioning transactions in {dollars}, a shopper who’s a baseball participant, and a “little taco place just a few doorways down.” However maybe that relative ubiquity is the purpose: The truth that Ning’s nail salon might be wherever in North America is what makes Choose a Colour all of the extra unsettling.—Allison Meakem
Midnight Timetable: A Novel in Ghost Tales
Bora Chung, trans. Anton Hur (Algonquin Books, 208 pp., $18.99, September 2025)
In Bora Chung’s Midnight Timetable, the horrors are virtually inappropriate. By no means thoughts the sheep with gaping surgical wounds or the cursed sneaker that threatens to squash a miniature model of its wearer. The Institute that homes these haunted objects is a reprieve from the actual world for a lot of of its workers.
“It’s not that there have been no unusual issues taking place in any respect,” one employee, who was beforehand pressured to bear conversion remedy and solid out by a household of non secular zealots, tells one other character. “It’s simply that my life has all the time been filled with unusual issues.”
His comment will get on the coronary heart of Chung’s novel made up of a collection of ghost tales, elegantly translated by Anton Hur. Rendered in taut and restrained prose and impressed by Korean and Slavic literature, these tales are replete with undead cats, stairs that result in imaginary halls, and satin cloth that’s haunted by the horrors that Kaya noble households confronted by the hands of the Silla in Sixth-century Korea.
The Institute and its objects present the scaffolding for Chung’s elaborate tales of human greed, grudges, and violence. Because the narrator remarks after recounting the paranormal occasions that tore aside a person’s life, “that’s the place a very totally different and a way more bizarre kind of household story started, one that isn’t a ghost story, however maybe the scariest story of all.” The general impact is as riotous as it’s unsettling.
Chung, whose brief story assortment Cursed Bunny was short-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize, as soon as stated in an interview that when she writes, she leans on the precept: “When doubtful, go towards logic and/or frequent sense.” It’s not a foul technique, in a world as nonsensical as ours. Midnight Timetable does what the perfect of horror, sci-fi, and different style writing can obtain: It renders our current realities unusual once more.—Chloe Hadavas
September Releases, In Transient
E.Y. Zhao’s debut novel, Underspin, items collectively the tragic lifetime of a desk tennis wunderkind. Indian novelist Kiran Desai supplies a literary love story for our globalized world with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. In Nathan Harris’s Amity, two previously enslaved siblings traverse the postbellum U.S. South and deserts of Mexico. Mia Couto’s The Cartographer of Absences, translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw, traces the collapse of Mozambique’s colonial regime. In Natsuo Kirino’s Swallows, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, a younger girl in Tokyo turns to surrogacy to make ends meet.
British literary juggernaut Ian McEwan’s 18th novel, What We Can Know, forays into speculative fiction in Twenty second-century England. Good and Evil and Different Tales, the most recent assortment by Nationwide E-book Award-winning Argentine creator Samanta Schweblin, is translated into English by Megan McDowell. A younger man navigates life and love in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon in Lilas Taha’s Waseem. In Defne Suman’s The Final Condo in Istanbul, seven a long time of Turkish politics are advised by the eyes of 1 Greek man. And Italian Mexican author Fabio Morábito’s brief story assortment, The Shadow of the Mammoth, is translated into English by Curtis Bauer.—CH
