MISSING PASSPORTS

Missing Passports is a comic novella set in Beijing in 1984, following an unnamed American tour guide who discovers, upon arriving at the Great Wall Hotel with a busload of affluent American tourists, that he has lost all thirty-four passports in his care. Slim, swift, and consistently entertaining, it is a caper story at heart — but one with genuine literary intelligence underneath its breezy surface. Cunningham, working familiar territory as an American China hand, is here at his most purely comic, and the result is one of his most assured and pleasurable pieces of fiction.