Trip Wires: Stories [Paperback]

TRIP WIRES travels around the world, with stories, many of children, set against turbulent socio-political backdrops from Afghanistan to Syria to Columbia to America, and examines how the dilemma of isolation is a common human condition. The terrain is different in each story, but all of these young people face the dilemma of being without resources even as they try to find and maintain relationships. Accepting of tragedy and insurmountable challenges, they nonetheless show humanity and grace, and remind us of the best in ourselves.

Like their namesake, the stories populating Trip Wires are mercilessly taut. Told largely from the perspectives of youths torn from their roots by war, these are stories that carry like radio signals across terrains of unrest and displacement. Ms. Hunter's juxtaposition of settingsAfghanistan, then Los Angeles; Syria, then again to the city of angelsheightens the immigrant's sense of diasporic otherness in places both near and far from home. This is what life looks like when conflict repaints the canvas against which her characters seek love, family and a moment's stability. Her keen eye for twinned detailsthe fleeting safety of an imam's lap is set against a prayer rug in the back room of a California suburban home, far from neighbors' eyeslends this collection a rare power and poignancy. Not to be missed. —David Rocklin,The Luminist

In Trip Wires, Sandra Hunter deftly traverses the globe to fraught landscapes of war, protest, imprisonment, kidnapping, and escape. She uncoils the violence of conflict, of barbed wires and radio wires, iron jails and mental jails that cause a people to humiliate and murder their own, or those not like them. But within this poignant collection, theres a thread that compels her characters to reach for survival, and its this gossamer wire, these small miracles of love, that electrify her stories. —Shilpa Agarwal, author ofHaunting Bombay

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