Bilu

Bangkok, 1998. A city on fire. A young man with nothing left to lose. Nawat Johnson is twenty-two years old. He is tall, handsome, and half-Australian — a luk khrueng in a country that has never quite accepted him. His father abandoned him when he was one. His mother sent him away to boarding school and then to university. He grew up in the villas of Ekkamai and the dormitories of Ramkhamhaeng and the neon streets of Patpong, carrying a silence that no one else could see. He is a good student. He is a quiet son. He is a stranger in his own skin. And then, in March 1998, in the middle of the worst economic crisis in Thailand's history, he does something that no one — not his mother, not his professors, not the police — ever expected. He sets four abandoned warehouses on fire. BILU is the story of a young man who was never seen, and who made the whole city hear him. It is the story of a luk khrueng boy who walked out of Bangkok and never came back. It is the story of a father found, a life rebuilt, and a silence carried for twenty-eight years — until the day a journalist walked into a small fishing shop in Brunswick Heads, Australia, and asked one simple question. Did you do it?