Spiritland by Nava Renek

Fiction. SPIRITLAND follows the journey of Maddy Foster as she travels through the fringe world of backpackers, drug dealers, Vietnam Vets, and other ex-pats living in Thailand. During Maddy's first week in Bangkok, she discovers a notice on a traveler's bulletin board where parents are seeking information about their missing daughter. From that moment on, Maddy embarks on her own informal search for this fellow American woman, meanwhile losing herself in the quest. Throughout her journey, Maddy chooses to surround herself with other lost souls whose stories are interwoven with her own and may explain the choices the characters make and the factors that have gotten them into their unusual, and sometimes desperate, circumstances. Maddy's deteriorating state of mind and escalating drug use lead to a succession of bad decisions, bringing her closer to her own destruction. "Nava Renek's SPIRITLAND moves with all the intensity and subtlety of an Asian tiger-it is at once both beautiful and powerful. Her character Maddy Foster wavers in a modern-day purgatory between the ancient and the addicted, ancestral spirits and the spiritually lost. Her exquisite descent into hell is recorded with such a poetic realism it reads as if Dante himself had updated Let's Go Thailand 2002"--Arthur Nersesian, author of The Fuck-Up.