Hi, I'm Linda Holmes, filling in this week for Andrew Limbong, and this is NPR's Book of the Day.

If you went to a nail salon and all the women who worked there had the same name every time you went, would you notice?

Ning, the salon manager at the center of the new novel Pick a Color isn't sure you would.

Author Suvankum Tamavangsa tells Ning's story as one of loneliness, not just hers, but her clients

as well. There's not even enough connection for those clients to notice that all the workers

are named Susan to save the trouble of getting new name tags. Tomavangsa told NPR Scott Simon that over the course of a single day, Ning brings the reader into her world, sometimes using a part of her history that recurs again and again in her mind, prize fighting. Ning is the manager of what she calls a brightly lit box in an unnamed city, a place that she calls, Susan's.

I live in a world of Susan's. I got name tags for everyone who works at the snail salon, and on everyone is printed the name, Susan. So many girls come and go. I don't want to

bother getting new name tags each time. Besides, you know, it's never difficult to pronounce a name

like Susan. None of our clients notice, They come in and we are ready and set to work.

That's all that matters to them. Pick a color is a new novel, set over a single day in a nail salon,

and it is the first novel of Sivan Kam Tamavononza, the highly acclaimed Canadian short story writer and poet.

She joins us from our studios in New York.

Thanks so much for being with us.

Thanks so much for having me on your show.

Ning was a boxer, and that's kind of central to how she sees the world, isn't it?

Yes, and before she landed working in a nail salon, she had been a prize fighter.

We only get little snippets of it throughout the day as she works and thinks of that time.

Things she learned from boxing, like controlling the center line, she brings

that idea to the face that when you remove eyebrow hair, you try to control the center line.

And the idea that when you enter the ring, you have to protect yourself at all times.

It's sort of the same way in a nail salon.

When someone walks onto the floor, you have to read what they want, what their intentions are, and you react in that moment.

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