Excerpt from Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Cold toes were bearable then because we knew relief awaited at the end of recess, when we'd troop inside a warm school, and they were bearable now because we'd finish the day in a cozy Georgian home. But when we arrived in town and asked around for the friend of a friend, a gloomy, blunt-shouldered man claimed he wasn't there. He'd departed for a few days, or had never lived there to begin with, or possibly didn't exist at all—I couldn't quite tell which from the man's dismissive hand gestures. Mel and I were wrong to stand there expectantly, waiting for an invitation to stay, but we'd been spoiled by hospitality in Turkey and dreaded the idea of backtracking. Icy slush gummed the cables and gears on the bikes, and when I wiggled my toes to warm them I only succeeded in sloshing frigid water around. The man stared at us without curiosity, as if into a great distance. When a grandmotherly woman shuffled over I was sure she'd be more sympathetic, but she just held her hand to her mouth in wordless surprise or perhaps dismay. Her age probably meant she had been a citizen of the USSR and had seen peaceful demonstrations for Georgian independence shot down by Soviet troops. She'd lived through civil wars and violent separatist movements, bread shortages and energy blackouts. She perhaps mistrusted the modern promise of neo-liberal democracy and wasn't wrong to do so; it was just the latest fad for organizing life in the South Caucasus, a subtle variation on the kingdoms, dynasties, and empires that had risen and fallen before. A gold ring hung on her thin finger, loosely orbiting the bone—a hand that had held hunger once and probably expected to grip it again.

Mel and I turned around and shivered back down the road we'd just biked up. At least it was downhill. Sometimes detours are the destination, and sometimes they're just detours. I didn't dry out from all the puddles until we reached Tbilisi days later.

Excerpted from Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris. Copyright © 2018 by Kate Harris. Excerpted by permission of Dey Street Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.