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