Hi, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Linda Holmes. Most of the time I host the NPR podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, but I'm visiting over here for the next couple of weeks. There are 10 short stories in Patricia Engel's collection, The Far Away World. That's not what any of the stories are called. That title comes from deep inside Engel's own family history, the travels that helped forge her identity. And identity is what a lot of these stories are about. Not just the identities of people in the Latin American diaspora, but the identities of twins, of women fighting for control, even ownership, as Engle puts it, of their

own bodies. The stories are about what it means to want something better for yourself and what

it can take to get it. As she tells NPR's Lila Faddle, it's one of those things you hear

somebody say and you just know you'll always remember it, desire comes with risk.

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Patricia Engel's new short story collection delves into the question of what if. It's called the faraway world, and each story features

characters searching for something more in their lives. These are gritty yet hopeful stories

about the human condition, told largely through characters that are part of the Latin American

diaspora. Engel says she wrote these 10 stories one by one over the last decade.

They came to me at very different points in my life when I was thinking about very different things.

But of course they are connected by this motivating force for change, desire, and the ever-changing conditions of identity and movements and changing geography and landscape

and diaspora. Those are things that I explore in all my writing and it's something that I explore

in my life. So, of course, it permeates my stories. You start the collection with a story about

twins whose mother really pushes on them that they are one.

The story that you're mentioning Aida is a story about two twin sisters, and one of them

disappears.

And the mother has always really encouraged their closeness, that very particular closeness

of twins, and the father always pushed their individuality.

And you get a sense of how that conflicting message comes up against them and how they perceive

...