One of those women, Nee, struggles to come to terms with the murder of her friends by the military in the mid-70s. A jazz pianist in the 1970s is hired to perform for the ghosts that haunt the house of a wealthy ageing woman her son, Sammy, visits his dying father in London after a restless existence trying in vain to settle down in a number of countries with a number of different women. A 19th-century missionary struggles to adjust to the harshness of life in the tropics and, later, the futility of his calling. In a swirling, always surprising storytelling structure that at times recalls David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Sudbanthad skilfully orchestrates the huge cast of characters. Their lives may span different eras and locations, even imagined worlds, but they are constantly pulled back to a central reality that revolves around Bangkok.

The indelibility of memory – both individual and collective – forms the central pillar of this sprawling, multi-generational novel, where characters appear and disappear, only to reappear a hundred pages and several decades later. As the tides of Bangkok’s history flow around them, the two are united by a sense of loss and confusion: how can they reconcile their pasts, even as they struggle to comprehend their city’s headlong rush into the future? The condominium block in which she and Sammy find themselves caught in this moment of unexpected tenderness stands on a plot of land that was once the compound of Sammy’s family home. Nee herself lives with a painful, complicated story that decades have failed to heal. She is speaking to a grieving man named Sammy, back in Bangkok after years abroad and now forced to confront his tangled relationship with his parents and his home city. “T he not remembering doesn’t really work, does it?” says Nee, one of the many characters in Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s exuberant, meticulously plotted debut.

Bangkok wakes to rain a novel