Winner of the first annual Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize
ISBN: 979-8-9923690-5-2
Trade paperback
Publication date: July 21, 2026
The Age of Migration explores how lives are shaped by movement across borders, cultures and classes, generations, and inner landscapes. Set in intimate and unsettled places around the world, these stories follow people who leave, arrive, flee, or remain, confronting what motion promises and what it demands in return.
In Haiti, a small band of travelers ventures deep into the country, seeking purpose, escape, or redemption, only to discover that the terrain, both human and physical, offers no simple passage. In Paris, an unhoused worker resting by the Seine, who has survived by keeping his choices small, faces a sudden moral decision that strips away his carefully guarded defenses. On a protected island in Puerto Rico, a grandmother joins her son’s family for what she imagines will be a restorative visit, when her well-meant interventions ripple into unforeseen consequences.
Characters navigate illness, labor, aging, love, and the fragile idea of home as the ground beneath them shifts. What unites them is reckoning—the moment when movement fails to deliver all that was hoped for and reality must be redefined.
The Age of Migration illuminates the human costs of our rising mobility and the challenge of discerning where the journey must end.
Citations from the judges of the prize:
"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 Postcolonial Murder and Cowboys and East Indians, winner of the PEN Open Book Award
"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
The Age of Migration: A Novella and Stories
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 lives in Paris, France and Wellfleet, Massachusetts.