At 12:50:52 MMT, a locked seam under Myanmar lets go. In Mandalay—and as far as Bangkok—a city’s story changes in a sideways breath. Told in many voices and built from verifiable details of the March 28, 2025, earthquake, this documentary-style novella brings the day before, the minute of, and the hundred days after to urgent life.

Why this book is different

Instead of a single hero narrative, this is a polyphonic (multi-POV) portrait that mirrors the way real disasters unfold—fragmented, overlapping, then slowly organized. Time-stamped scenes move like field notes turned into story: a ward clerk at a ticking fan, a nurse in Stairwell C, a monk making a message board, a mason teaching ring beams, a convoy driver counting bridges, a registrar turning names into records, a Bangkok rescuer listening for taps in a fallen tower.

What you’ll experience inside

• Clinic under canvas: triage tags, crush-injury protocols, scarce anesthesia, wound care that has to be enough.
• Roads & rivers: detours, metered bridges, fuel math, and the logistics choices that feel like ethics.
• Missing & found: communications blackouts, Red Cross tracing, verified vs. rumor lists, the language of “provisional.”
• Conflict in the rubble: neutrality, checkpoints, and how ambulances cross when corridors aren’t corridors.
• Bangkok’s collapse: void searches, progressive-collapse grammar, counting and closure.
• Codes & consequences: why soft stories fail; how straps, ring beams, tie-columns, and confined masonry change outcomes.
• Counting: how agencies count the dead, why numbers disagree, and why transparency is a condolence.
• Research Boxes: time-zone conversion, aftershock reality, missing-person protocols, soft-story fixes, disease myth-busting.

Built different on purpose

Fact-woven and rigorously time-stamped, the book blends eyewitness-style scenes with the overlooked machinery of response—ledgers, checklists, quiet hours, build-back-safer details—so listeners feel the chaos and the choreography.

For fans of documentary-style and polyphonic fiction—stories that honor ordinary hands doing extraordinary, necessary work.