Combining surreal symbolism and linear narrative, wordplay and lists, family history and mythic retellings, Unnikrishnan uses fiction to '[illuminate] how temporary status affects psyches, families, memories, fables, and language(s).' In a brilliant, subversive move, Unnikrishnan connects his three 'books' with a single-word chapter, 'Pravasis' – Malayalam for migrant, or 'temporary people' in Unnikrishnan-speak, which he repeats three times in each book ... [an] unsettling, dazzling, astute collection ... Its publication couldn’t be more timely given the current outcries for and against immigrants, bans, raids, and mass deportations. As an antidote to border politics, Unnikrishnan’s stories serve as both testimony and oracle to be read with grave urgency.

Deepak Unnikrishnan’s new novel is made even more moving by the author’s statement about writing it: 'Temporary People is a work of fiction set in the UAE, where I was raised and where foreign nationals constitute over 80 percent of the population. It is a nation built by people who are eventually required to leave' ... There is nothing comfortable about Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People, but it is challenging, thought-provoking and timely.

With its casually fantastic elements and kinetic, propulsive prose, the lineage of Unnikrishnan’s fiction can be traced to George Saunders and Nikolai Gogol. In many of the stories, the fantastic illuminates deeper truths related to the condition of migrant workers ... While the premises of these stories are weird gems, the true wonder is Unnikrishnan’s masterful drive, his pushing of each story’s starting point to wild, interesting places. Temporary People is streaked with artistic genius — it is startling, deeply unnerving and urgent.

In Temporary People’s best moments, Unnikrishnan is able to juggle the supernatural elements of his worlds with the terrible truth. His oddity is always geared towards exposing, and his imagination is finely tuned to see the right devices. The primary challenge the book faces is achieving balance ... It is a book with explicit social and political aims. Reading through Temporary People, any unaware reader will begin the journey towards greater awareness. It is also absolutely relevant; it’s an important lens, but a narrow one. Relevance is temporary, and this book is much more than that. Some stories are otherworldly and other are not. Some are less than a page, others a more conventional length. His flexibility is impressive in itself, and Temporary People’s ideological center allows for it without sacrificing cohesion ... A heavy brake-foot is, however, this collection’s biggest issue. Perhaps it is a matter of prizing the political over the narrative—not, by any means, inherently bad—but some of the longer stories feel like they take too long. As a book, the inclusion of stories of many different lengths creates a nice flow, but the stories are stronger when they are rapid and efficient.

What separates Unnikrishnan from Rushdie, and the vast literature of exile that precedes them, are his subjects. Temporary People explores the lives of arguably the least privileged class of nomads in the 21st century: guest workers ... Temporary People is a robust, if somewhat scattered, entry into the nascent portrayal of migrant labor in the Gulf ... In Unnikrishnan’s imaginings, this ever-present threat of displacement comes to the fore only during his characters’ most naked moments. His depictions of sex are entangled with the ganglia of residency, race, class and gender, as well as the instability and inadequacy of language, the collection’s constant refrain ... Unnikrishnan’s collection poses its questions obliquely, but demands explicit answers. What causes a society to look like this?

Unnikrishnan, writing from the perspective of the proletariat, creates a vivid bottom-up vernacular history of the modern Gulf oil state. Yet his book also poses poignant questions about migrant identity more generally ... The stories circulating on the pages of Temporary People work to render an invisible community visible. These stories push back against narratives of collective impermanence through the creation of mythologies that connect home and away, as well as past and future ... Without the consolations of citizenship or status, Unnikrishnan’s migrants become global vagrants, circulating in a kind of interstitial no man’s land where they morph from one identity to another, but never find home.

Deepak Unnikrishnan's collection of linked stories, Temporary People, employs surrealism, magical realism, and notes of paranoia to picture life in the emirate of Abu Dhabi… The standard Emirati narrative is by now familiar: gross wealth and inequality, gross mistreatment of its labor force … People come to work, but when their contract is up, they must leave … Unnikrishnan's book is remarkable for individualizing these stories, rather than politicizing them, as well as brave …gives voice to the people who live here and reveals the uniqueness of the whole experiment … Unnikrishnan's version of the Emirates share something of the claustrophobic strangeness of early twentieth-century Prague as well as its tendency for anthropomorphic insecthood … This is a book of laborers and their stories, but announces a dawning political issue that transcends their specific woes.

The author’s crisp, imaginative prose packs a punch, and his whimsical depiction of characters who oscillate between two lands on either side of the Arabian Sea unspools the kind of immigrant narratives that are rarely told. An enchanting, unparalleled anthem of displacement and repatriation.

There is much to admire in Unnikrishnan’s fanciful and fervent debut ... The style varies widely; one tale consists simply of a list of professions and adjectives. Some of the longer allegorical stories achieve the proper mix of absurdity and pathos. Others, however, force a flimsy conceit to bear too much weight. Interspersed throughout are briefer pieces, from one paragraph to several pages in length, concise meditations that offer up the book’s best expressions of what it means to be an outsider in a land far from home.