In the Country: Stories

While globetrotting often seems to connote this idea of a jet-set life between airports and across continents, there is also its less glamorous side of migration, specifically those for economic reasons. On the jacket of Mia Alvar's debut short story collection, In the Country, her nine stories (although the final titular story might, at 85 pages, be considered a novella) are described as "globetrotting," and while they certainly traverse the globe, the stories instead tend to focus on the daily lives of those at home and abroad, and on the universal themes of longing, compassion, displacement and home.