Book review: Ghosts of history haunt Bangkok's urban jungle

BANGKOK -- In Emma Larkin's wonderfully imaginative and realistically detailed novel, Bangkok is a place intent on burying its own skeletons: political, historical and economic, the skeletons are lying, forgotten, in the swampy land on which gleaming high-rise buildings shoot up to the sky to proclaim the victory of willful oblivion. They are carcasses discarded by Thai authoritarianism and sucked deeper under earth, as has happened in the past three decades, by the inexorable force of capitalism.