Tiphanie Yanique’s How to Escape from a Leper Colony is a skillfully crafted collection of short stories that offer ample rewards—vivid characterizations, evocative language—at their finish lines.

Like her protagonists, Yanique hails from the Caribbean; her stories are set in locales ranging from New York and Texas to Guyana and the ghost island of Chacachacare. “The Saving Work” follows two childhood friends: Thomas, named “after the island of his birth,” and Jasmine, who both attend college in New York. They fall clumsily into a romantic relationship while obsessing over the implications of