Temporary People
SynopsisPlot
In the United Arab Emirates, foreign nationals constitute over 80 percent of the population. Brought in to construct the towering monuments to wealth that punctuate the skylines of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, this labor force works without the rights of citizenship, endures miserable living conditions, and is ultimately forced to leave the country. 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.
Story
About this book
Temporary People is Deepak Unnikrishnan's debut work of fiction, built as twenty-eight linked stories set in and around the United Arab Emirates. Its subject is the foreign labor force that raises and maintains the towers of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Foreign nationals make up more than 80 percent of the country's population, yet most arrive without any path to citizenship. Workers live in difficult conditions and are expected to leave when their contracts end.
The stories move between the Gulf and lands on the far side of the Arabian Sea, following characters split between the country where they work and the homes they left. Unnikrishnan uses surreal invention to portray construction laborers, domestic workers, and their children. Bodies come apart and are put back together. Languages shift and collide, bending realism to hold conditions that plain narration might flatten.
The book won the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. Unnikrishnan, who grew up in Abu Dhabi in a family from India, writes about displacement and return, and about people whose lives are legally temporary in the places they help build.
