Veeraporn Nitiprapha Knihy

On the day Chareeya is born, her mother discovers her father having an affair with a traditional Thai dancer. From then on, Chareey's life is fated to carry the weight of her parents' disappointments. She and her sister grow up in a lush riverside town near the Thai capital, Bangkok, captivated by trashy romance novels, classical music and games of make-believe. When the laconic orphan, Pran, enters their world, he unwittingly lures the sisters into a labyrinth of their own making as they each try to escape their intertwined fates. The original Thai langaue edition of The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth won the prestigious South East Asian Writers ("S.E.A. Write") Award for fiction and was best-seller in Thailand. It is translated into English by Thai film critic and recipient of France's Chevalier dans I'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Kong Rithdee. Attuned to the addictive rhythms of a Thai soap opera and written with the consuming intensity of a fever dream, this novel opens an insightful and truly compelling window onto the Thai heart.

A Sino-Chinese family find their destiny is inseparably entangled with that of the country they have adopted as a home. Not long before the Communist revolution, Tong, sent by his peasant-parents in impoverished rural China to work with a relative in Siam, has risen to become a rice-trading tycoon in Bangkok's Chinatown, married a former palace cook and built a large family in the town of Pad Riew. Haunted by the dream of returning to his true home in China, Tong, along with his wife and their five children, are swept along by the torrents of history as World War II breakout and China turns red, while the military strongman in Thailand act out the interminable cycle of power struggle, rebellion and coup d'état. Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat, the award-winning second novel by Veerapon Nitiprapha, is a generations-spanning family saga that explores the roots of the Chinese diaspora in Siam and how the tragedy of ruined love, maternal betrayal and futile ambition shape the lives of Tong's clan members, each of them hounded by their own ghosts and burdened by their own sins. All of this is played out against the backdrop of Siam's mid-century social and political history, the most chaotic period the formation of the nation.