ILLUMINE

Bangkok. Present day. A young Thai woman named Naiyana works her family's bakery in the Talat Noi neighborhood, photographs everything she sees with a battered 200-baht Olympus camera from Chatuchak market, and tells herself she has no talent, no future, and no reason to want more than what she has.

A few blocks away, on a bench near the Chao Phraya river, an American filmmaker named Larry Cortez sits with an oliang he barely tastes, watching a city he can no longer see clearly. He flew twelve thousand miles to disappear. He is succeeding.

Then she lies down in the grass and tries to photograph a flower. He opens his mouth before he can stop himself: "Your highlights are blown."

What follows is not a love story — or rather, it is something more specific than that. It is a story about what happens when one person sees another person clearly, perhaps for the first time in either of their lives. About the particular ache of a love that cannot be named. About what it means to give someone everything you know and then let them go.

The novel is told almost entirely from Naiyana's perspective — including her rapid-fire Thai internal monologues, her arguments with her practical mother Somchai, her fat orange cat Som, and the slow, private dawning of a self she didn't know she was allowed to be.

From Chapter One — Talat Noi, Bangkok, Morning:

She was flat on her stomach in the grass, which she knew looked insane, but the flower was right there and the light was doing something she had never seen light do before and she was not going to stand up like a normal person and miss it.

Tham-mai suay jang tawn yoo khaang nawk, tae paw yoo nai jaw glaai pen dawk-mai dtaai?
Why are you so beautiful out here but when I take your picture you look like a dead flower?

She shot. Checked the screen. Groaned. Shot from lower. Checked. Groaned again. Sat back on her heels, blew hair out of her face, and tried to remember if there was a setting on this camera that made things not terrible.

There wasn't. She'd checked.

From the bench fifteen feet away, a voice — older, male, American accent, completely unbothered about speaking to a stranger lying on the ground: "Your highlights are blown."

Naiyana looked up.