Much like her characters in The King of Limbo, Harun, in 1982, was looking for a place where she could feel at ease. Her Canadian husband was weary of the humid summers, and both of them felt they needed to make some kind of change. Her husband said: "Why don’t we just take a drive out west and see how you like it?" So they crossed the continent and ended up in Port Townsend, a town of some seven thousand people within sight of, on a clear day, Victoria, British Columbia. Though surrounded by natural beauty and known as Washington’s Victorian seaport, Port Townsend was not the most promising destination in which to settle. "When we first arrived," says Harun, "the Hood Canal Bridge—the peninsula’s main link to the mainland—had just blown away in a storm. The town was pretty run down back then. Many buildings on the waterfront were empty. The stores that remained played musical chairs, so that even in local commerce, a transitory state seemed to prevail. It was the sort of place my parents would run from as fast as they could." Harun, though, remained, the starkness and rain-dampened days growing on her. "The isolation seemed exotic to me at first," she says. "After all, I’d grown up on the East Coast where one town melded into another without any sign of separation."

Harun and her husband weren’t the only people who found the town a welcome change. Much like the fictional inhabitants of Salish Bay, the population of Port Townsend was just as varied. "There were a lot of people who didn’t seem to belong back east or down south or in the city or on the farm," Harun says. "They were displaced." As Harun wrote stories, she found that the characters she created were in the same straits. Though their circumstances and backgrounds varied from those of Port Townsend citizens, the characters all found their way to the same geographical location, one akin to Harun’s own surroundings. "It didn’t occur to me until I’d been here a few years that it might be because Port Townsend was isolated geographically that the community made room for so many disparate characters," Harun says. "Since the characters I write about are often trying to find their places between isolation and community, Salish Bay seemed a natural place for their stories."

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"She possesses the rare ability to see the world at an odd tilt that makes everything appear new," said Richard Russo about the stories in Adrianne Harun's exhilarating debut collection. With elegance and precision reminiscent of Alice Munro, and the probing, unsentimental eye for detail of A.M. Homes, Adrianne Harun displays a formidable talent for discovering the meaning in ordinary human suffering.

In stories and styles ranging from the magic realism of "Lukudi," to the carefully modulated madness of "The Eighth Sleeper of Ephesus," to the gritty realistic portrait of domestic trauma in the title story, Adrianne Harun again and again displays a unique ability to view the world from a dazzling array of perspectives, and to transcend the facts of everyday situations to attain poetry and truth. In The King of Limbo and Other Stories, Adrianne Harun emerges as a consummate stylist and a writer to watch.