WHAT COULD BE SAVED

“We’re connected by a tough net of karma - it’s more complicated than you see.”

This atmospheric, beautifully written novel tells the captivating story of the Preston family, Americans living in Thailand during the early 1970s, until their son Philip disappeared, fracturing their family forever. Decades later, Laura Preston learns that a man in Thailand may be her lost brother. Will her quest for answers repair her fractured family - or open more questions that can never fully be resolved? Through an alternating timeline with multiple perspectives, What Could Be Saved reveals a portrait of a family unraveling against a ticking time bomb, in a faraway land where unseen threats are the most dangerous kind.

This suspenseful, engrossing and sometimes unsettling book explores the paired themes of grief and forgiveness, guilt and redemption. There is also a subtle, well-executed subtext of American narrow mindedness and microaggressions, especially in the depictions of the Prestons’ Thai staff, who are rendered invisible even in their own country: given more “manageable” names, fired for minor infractions, necessary to the Prestons yet interchangeable and dispensable. Their stories gave the book texture and soul, as did the notion that Westerners’ long ingrained fears - dysentery! snakes! - are not the ones to worry about. The often unseen dangers of ignorance and naivety are instead the greatest threats of all.

Having traveled to Thailand many years ago, I loved revisiting the beautiful wats, fascinating antiquities, and incomparable food through this story. I still remember the simplest meals were my favorites: tropical fruit for breakfast and pad thai from street carts. I tried to recreate the pad thai here, only to remember I made this dish for This Is How It Always Is back in 2018. Whoops! Got to expand my repertoire!