In the titular story of Jack Wang's debut collection, "We Two Alone," Leonard Xiao, founder of the Asian American Shakespeare Company, separates from his wife, Emily — also an actor — when she tires of their profession's inherent uncertainty.

Emily's position — "If it hadn't happened by now, it was never going to happen" — is abhorrent to Leonard, who privately insists, "The late bloom — it was still possible."

Recalling the day the couple met, Wang writes, "the reel of time got flung out, thrillingly." Many of these finely crafted stories share this preoccupation with time. In the case of stories set against a backdrop of war or violent policy — "The Night of Broken Glass," "The Nature of Things," "Everything in Between" — the question of time becomes charged with the need to escape before it runs out. Each story features immigrants or children of immigrants, and some of the characters suffer grave indignities (in "Everything in Between," a Chinese medical student in Witwatersrand finds that there are "certain cadavers he wasn't allowed to touch"). The question of where to make a home safely is omnipresent.

There is not, in this collection, a single kind of home. Settings vary wildly — wintry Vancouver and seaside South Africa; Nazi-occupied Austria; England and New York — and Wang's prose is equally confident among them. The physicality of the writing is one of its greatest strengths: In "The Valkyries," there are breathtaking scenes of young Nelson playing ice hockey. In "The Nature of Things," as a pregnant woman flees an encroaching military attack, Wang's sense of how to use space on the page intensifies each scene.

Alice, hidden in a cabinet in an altar room, "would have felt safe in total darkness, her body dematerialized, but a gap between two panels let in a spray of light, enough to prove that she was still there."

"We Two Alone," "The Valkyries" and "The Nature of Things" begin with fresh air and hope, but Wang slowly narrows the space afforded to his characters, both literally and figuratively, to astonishing effect.

Several of the stories — "Allhallows," "Belsize Park" and "We Two Alone" — grapple with the end of romantic relationships. In "We Two Alone," Wang often invokes the language of displacement and war. Emily's favorite piece of furniture is "repatriated"; when Emily tries to persuade Leonard to give up acting, he considers that "he could at last rise from the trenches."

Even in the stories spared from active warfare, Wang's carefully wrought characters grapple with their own ambitions and failures, an all-consuming battle he captures beautifully.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy's writing has appeared in One Story, Electric Literature, Lenny Letter, Narrative, Harvard Review and elsewhere. She held a 2014-16 Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

We Two Alone
By: Jack Wang.
Publisher: HarperVia, 246 pages, $25.99.