Sightseeing - Tapa dura

Sightseeing refuses to take the tourist routes or pay the farang prices at the market. In poignant, tough, heart-catching episodes, Rattawut Lapcharoensap takes his readers beneath the surface of Thailand to a place that is dynamic and corrupt, full of pride and passion and fear. In these intergenerational stories of luck and loss, mother and son, Thai and tourist, healthy and sick are bound together. Sightseeing introduces its readers to the young boy and his brother speeding on a moped to the Cafe Lovely, a brothel in Bankok; Priscilla the Cambodian, a girl whose mouth is stuffed with the family fortune; a woman approaching blindness who barters for a last pair of sunglasses; and a pig called Clint Eastwood. Sightseeing reveals, slowly and powerfully that no place is too far away from home when it comes to pain, anger, love or hurt. It explores through confident and unforgettable storytelling what it means to be a son, a brother, a parent, a lover, a Thai - and a disenfranchised resident of the global village.

Rattawut Lapcharoensap was born in Chicago in 1979 and raised in Bangkok. He was educated at Triamudomsuksa Pattanakarn, Cornell University and the University of Michigan, where he received an MFA in Creative Writing. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Sightseeing (2005) is his first book.In 2007 he was named as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.