If you see Orwell and Kafka\n together walking down a street, you are in the world of Samrat Upadhyay's Mad\n Country. The editor of an investigative magazine contends with the trauma of\n a disappeared colleague, a political tragedy that vies for her attention with\n a more domestic crisis: a friend who’s suicidal over a divorce. An American\n hippie in Kathmandu in the 1980s undergoes a drastic identity change, only to\n discover that the metamorphosis brings its own heartbreak. A young man forms\n a bond with an African woman who has inexplicably appeared on the streets of\n the city. A wealthy Nepali boy—a Richie Rich—finds himself pretending to be a\n beggar to understand why his mother abandoned him. These eight stories are\n from the master chronicler of our modern-day anxieties, globalization and\n exile. Mad Country takes you to places that you have always yearned to go but\n were always afraid to.