On his quest to understand what it means to belong to a nation, and what it means to go outside the borders of that nation. Robin Hemley takes us to a “British pub to outdo all British pubs” in the Falkland Islands, a cemetery in a small town in Northern Italy for WWI soldiers whose deaths were “strikingly meaningless,” to a European outpost of Russia in the former German city of Konigsberg for Russian Federation Day, and to Omaha, Nebraska to visit one of the world’s largest indoor rainforests. He introduces us to a young Afghan refugee barely hanging on in Australia, and a Chinese billionaire whose ornate mansion in his impoverished ancestral village boasts among many classical Chinese statues a “statue of an American soldier, machine gun in hand,” just to cover all the bases. We meet many whose sense of patriotism or nationalism has been strengthened or cut adrift by circumstance and history and who help him make a case for his own multiple sense of belonging. Part memoir, part travelogue, part reportage, and part meditation on the borders that divide us and bring us together, BORDERLINE CITIZEN, in the words of author Ira Sukrungruang, “brings to light the power of place, the echoes of hope even in desolation, and reminds us that in every land there are people living and surviving and loving.”