Temporary People

Set among the foreign workers who make up more than 80 percent of the population of the United Arab Emirates, Deepak Unnikrishnan's debut is a book of twenty-eight linked stories. The laborers build and serve the towers of Abu Dhabi and Dubai with no path to citizenship, and many are eventually made to leave. The stories mix realism and fantasy: construction workers turn into luggage to escape a labor camp, a woman stitches together the bodies of people who fall from unfinished buildings, and a man breeds model workers built to last twelve years. Unnikrishnan writes in an inventive, unruly global English. The book won the Restless Books Prize, given for new immigrant writing, and was published in 2017.

Sapaad co-founder Anoop Anthony described it as a superb work of magic realism about expatriates and the Indian diaspora in the Middle East.