From Patricia Engel, whose novel Infinite Country was a New York Times bestseller and a Reese’s Book Club pick, comes an exquisite collection of ten haunting, award-winning short stories set across the Americas and linked by themes of migration, sacrifice, and moral compromise.

With The Faraway World, Engel showcases characters from across the vast spectrum of Latin American immigration, and confronts, like no other author, the myriad challenges of exile and diaspora. In her S&S author questionnaire, Engel wrote: "I write the stories I want to see in the world, the ones I haven't seen represented, especially by writers from our own communities."

Two Colombian expats meet as strangers on the rainy streets of New York City, both burdened with traumatic pasts. In Cuba, a woman discovers her deceased brother’s bones have been stolen, and the love of her life returns from Ecuador for a one-night visit. A cash-strapped couple hustles in Miami, to life-altering ends.

The Faraway World is a collection of arresting stories from the New York Times bestselling author of Infinite Country, Patricia Engel, “a gifted storyteller whose writing shines even in the darkest corners” (The Washington Post). Intimate and panoramic, these stories bring to life the liminality of regret, the vibrancy of community, and the epic deeds and quiet moments of love. 

Patricia Engel is the author of Infinite Country, a New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club selection; The Veins of the Ocean, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, winner of the International Latino Book Award; and Vida, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway and Young Lions Fiction Awards, New York Times Notable Book, and winner of Colombia’s national book award, the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her stories appear in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Born to Colombian parents, and herself a dual citizen, Patricia is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Miami.

A writer of Uruguayan origins, Carolina De Robertis is the author of the novels The President and the Frog, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award; the award- winning Cantoras and The Gods of Tango. They is also an award winning translator of Latin American and Spanish literature. This year, they are an inaugural Baldwin-Emerson Fellow, gathering oral histories of queer and trans BIPOC elders in collaboration with Baldwin for the Arts and the Center for Oral History at Columbia University. De Robertis lives in Oakland, California, and is an associate professor at San Francisco State University.

Patricia Engel photo courtesy of Elliot & Erick Jimenez; Carolina De Robertis photo courtesy of Lori Eanes