The In-betweeners: a Collection of Short Stories

Described as ‘unflinching, sweeping, and stunningly intimate,’ Khem K. Aryal’s new short-story collection, The In-Betweeners, captures the fragile dreams and quiet heartbreaks of Nepalese immigrants in America—caught between the lives they left behind and the ones they are still trying to build. After years of believing that immigration was the ultimate triumph, they arrive in a land gripped by culture wars—where the immigrant dream is both idolized and weaponized. What unfolds is a moving exploration of belonging, loss, and resilience in a world that never stops asking ‘where are you really from?’ In ‘Laxman Sir in America’, a once-respected schoolteacher becomes a faceless worker at an Amazon warehouse, his dignity slowly eroded even as his family adapts more easily than he does. ‘Mrs Sharma’s Halloween’ follows a mother visiting her grown children and grandchildren, haunted by the slow realization that the dream of them returning to Nepal to care for her is fading away. And in ‘Shopping for Glasses’, a man’s simple quest for a new pair of spectacles spirals into a meditation on alienation, nostalgia, and the ache of invisibility. With tenderness and precision, Aryal exposes the ache of those living between languages, between homes, between selves. The In-Betweeners is a luminous portrait of exile and endurance—a book about the price we pay for our dreams, and the grace it takes to keep dreaming anyway.