Lost Children Archive

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One way I've been describing Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive is that it reads like a classic — as though even now, you can tell that this is a novel that will be pored over and taught, and will carry its gravity, grace, and intelligence into the future. But it's also immensely compelling, and the second half is so page-turning I raced through on first read, desperate to find out what happened. The story of this family is both revelatory and intimate, and Lost Children Archive is an extraordinary achievement. Recommended By Jill O., Powells.com

An exceptionally timely book about child migration and the life-or-death decisions made at the U.S.-Mexican border, while also a poignant story about a blended family trying to figure out how they fit into each others' lives. A haunting, beautiful, important work. Recommended By Mary S., Powells.com

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:
THE WASHINGTON POST - TIME MAGAZINE - NPR - CHICAGO TRIBUNE - GQ - O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE - THE GUARDIAN - THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS - LIT HUB - KIRKUS REVIEWS - THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY - BOSTON.COM - PUREWOW

"An epic road trip [that also] captures the unruly intimacies of marriage and parenthood...This is a novel that daylights our common humanity, and challenges us to reconcile our differences." The Washington Post

"Impossibly smart, full of beauty, heart and insight...Everyone should read this book." Tommy Orange

In Valeria Luiselli's fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet.

Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family's crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained — or lost in the desert along the way.

A breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive — a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.

"Electric, elastic, alluring, new." The New York Times

"Delicate, funny, effortlessly poetic." The Guardian

"A remarkable feat of empathy." NPR

"Virtuosic. . . . The brilliance of the writing stirs rage and pity. It humanizes us." The New York Times Book Review

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa, and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. She is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius Grant," the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and an American Book Award, and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award twice and the Kirkus Prize on three occasions. She has been a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in New York City.