THE IN-BETWEENERS includes thirteen short stories about immigrants from Nepal to the United States who must forge a sense of belonging and selfhood by reconciling what they have with what they’ve left behind.

The characters in these stories are cooks and Amazon warehouse laborers, students and professionals, grandmothers and fathers. But although their statuses vary—as citizens or as resident aliens; as family lodestones, pariahs, or breadwinners—all of them feel both drawn back to and shut out of the country they still think of as home. In “Election, 2017,” a former party member longs to return to Nepal, where the civil war has ended and he has a chance to take a position of some influence—except that his wife refuses to consider going back. In “Shopping for Glasses,” an indecisive man is baffled by the merchants at American shops who don’t even try to push pricey eyeglass frames on him. And in “Mrs. Sharma’s Halloween,” a grandmother who cannot stand living in an American suburb finds belonging in the neighborhood celebration of Halloween, which offers the first glimpse she’s seen of something like the festivals she enjoyed at home. Together these stories show us America from perspectives we have not seen before, with wit and a sharp eye for the absurd.