Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

TEMPORARY PEOPLE

Deepak Unnikrishnan

TIMELY FOCUS ON IMMIGRATION ISSUES
A SPOTLIGHT ON AN OVERLOOKED HUMANITARIAN CRISIS
A BRILLIANTLY IMAGINATIVE WRITER IN THE VEIN OF SALMAN RUSHDIE AND GEORGE SAUNDERS

In the United Arab Emirates, foreign nationals constitute over 80 percent of the population. Brought in to construct and serve the towering monuments to wealth that punctuate the skylines of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, this labor force is not given the option of citizenship. Some ride their luck to good fortune. Others suffer different fates. Until now, the humanitarian crisis of the so-called "guest workers" of the Gulf has barely been addressed in fiction.

With his stunning, mind-altering debut novel Temporary People , Deepak Unnikrishnan delves into their histories, myths, struggles, and triumphs. Combining the linguistic invention of Salman Rushdie and the satirical vision of George Saunders, Unnikrishnan presents twenty-eight linked stories that careen from construction workers who shapeshift into luggage and escape a labor camp, to a woman who stitches back together the bodies of those who've fallen from buildings in progress, to a man who grows ideal workers designed to live twelve years and then perish - until they don't, and found a rebel community in the desert. With this polyphony of voices, Unnikrishnan maps a new, unruly global English and gives personhood back to the anonymous workers of the Gulf.

Deepak Unnikrishnan is a writer and taleteller from Abu Dhabi (and now, Chicago). He has studied and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and presently teaches at New York University Abu Dhabi. Temporary People, his first book, was the inaugural winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.

Available products
Book Published 2017-03-01 by Restless Books

Comments

Elicits the vertigo of Joseph Heller and the disoriented human hopelessness of Milan Kundera . Taken together this discordant polyphony of stories is the full-throated roar of an entire people. His language is now solid, alive and dangerous. This is not an easy book; in fact it is eviscerating. But in Temporary People the Restless Books prize has rewarded an urgent voice worth attending to, even if it is hard to hear.

University of Western Australia Press

Western chatter about the U.A.E. was somehow reproducing, however unconsciously, the same dehumanization that it appeared to criticize. There was money-drunk decadence at the top, raw immiseration at the bottom, and little else .. No real life . Temporary People [is] a kaleidoscopic collection of loosely linked short stories set mostly in Abu Dhabi.... It's exactly the book I was looking for . [It] works wonders , jolting the readerly brain away from abstraction and directing it toward the fine grain of life. Unnikrishnan... insist[s] that there is more to the story.

Penguin Random House India

Recalls the cry of its closest forebear, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children . What separates Unnikrishnan from Rushdie, and the vast literature of exile that precedes them, are his subjects. Temporary People explores the lives of arguably the least privileged class of nomads in the twenty-first century: guest workers . Temporary People is a robust entry into the nascent portrayal of migrant labor in the Gulf .

"Guest workers of the United Arab Emirates embody multiple worlds and identities and long for home in a fantastical debut work of fiction. An enchanting, unparalleled anthem of displacement and repatriation."