Enter the world of the Delivery Boy, who must pedal his way to five-star customer ratings-and, perhaps, freedom-in novelist and graphic designer Peter Mendelsund's The Delivery.

Countries go wrong sometimes, and sometimes the luckier citizens of those countries have a chance to escape and seek refuge in another country-a country that might itself be in the process of going wrong.

In the bustling indifference of an unnamed city, one such citizen finds himself trapped working for a company that makes its money dispatching an army of undocumented refugees to bring the well-off men and women of this confounding metropolis their dinners. Whatever he might have been at home, this citizen is now a Delivery Boy: a member of a new and invisible working class, pedaling his power-assist bike through traffic, hoping for a decent tip and a five-star rating.

He is decidedly a Delivery Boy; sometimes he even feels like a Delivery Baby; certainly he's not yet a Delivery Man, though he'll have to man up if he wants to impress N., the aloof dispatcher who sends him his orders and helps him with his English.

Can our hero avoid the wrath of his Supervisor, get the girl, and escape his indentured servitude? Can someone in his predicament ever have a happy ending? Who gets to decide? And who's telling this story, anyway?

Harrowing and hilarious, The Delivery is a fable for and about our times: an exploration of the ways language and commerce unite and isolate every one of us, native and immigrant both.