Winner of the 2024 Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize, The Age of Migration follows people on the move— across borders, families, and inner lives— confronting what motion promises and what it costs. Set in intimate, unsettled places around the globe, these stories trace journeys shaped by choice, necessity, and circumstance. Travelers venture into unfamiliar terrain; workers and families face sudden moral reckonings; acts meant as care ripple into unforeseen consequences. With clarity, restraint, and emotional precision, The Age of Migration illuminates quiet negotiations of belonging and responsibility, and asks what it means to carry oneself forward in a world defined by constant change.
About the Author :
Kai Maristed is the author of three novels: Out After Dark (Pen/Hemingway finalist), Fall, and Broken Ground, and the short story collection Belong to Me. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, AGNI, The American Scholar, among others. She heads the anti-poverty NGO Technology Exchange Lab, Inc.. A translator and playwright fluent in three languages, she has taught at the MFA level at Harvard University, Emerson College, and the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She divides her time between Paris, France and Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
Review :
The Age of Migration gives us a glimpse into people's lives yearning to comprehend their place in the world fully. Through an array of voices, Kai Maristed evokes the universal and the unique in characters who are traveling unknown territories, both geographically and personally. These stories are full of discoveries, a book meant for the explorer in all of us mapping the familiar in new ways.
--Nina McConigley, author of How to Commit a Post Colonial Murder and Cowboys and East Indians
The Age of Migration is worldly in all senses. These are remarkable stories, full of beautiful urgencies, with indelible characters who get themselves in trouble all over the globe. A terrific book.
--Joan Silber, author of Mercy and Improvement
The Age of Migration takes readers both around the world and deep into the worlds of its characters, some of whom are mid-flight, some of whom think they've discovered a home. They know exactly what they're getting themselves into, until they find themselves in peril. In this remarkably wide-ranging collection, Kai Maristed demonstrates a masterful ability to imagine her way into the lives of others and--even more impressive--connect them to ours.
--Peter Turchi, author of (Don't) Stop Me if You've Heard This Before
