Lost Children Archive

WINNER OF THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD AND THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE AND THE WOMEN’S PRIZE The moving, powerful and urgent English-language debut from one of the brightest young stars in world literature Suppose you and Pa were gone, and we were lost. What would happen then? A family in New York packs the car and sets out on a road trip. This will be the last journey they ever take together. In Central America and Mexico, thousands of children are on a journey of their own, travelling north to the US border. Not all of them will make it there.

'Fascinating, haunting, poetic' Sunday Times ‘A mould-breaking new classic … The novel truly becomes novel again in her hands – electric, elastic, alluring, new’ New York Times ‘Daring, wholly original, brilliant … a twist on the great American road trip novel, a book about alienation that chronicles fractures, divides, and estrangement’ NPR ‘Timely and poignant’ Vogue ‘A wonderfully subtle story in which the experience of migrant children is filtered through the delicate, funny, effortlessly poetic account of a family’s road trip from New York to the Mexican border’ Guardian ‘Roving and beautiful … a searing indictment of America’s border policy' Daily Mail ‘Powerful and urgent’ Stylist

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983. She is the author of the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth, which won the 2016 LA Times Book Prize for Fiction; the essay collection Sidewalks; and Tell Me How It Ends, an essay about the situation facing children arriving at the US-Mexico border without papers. Lost Children Archive is her first novel written in English.

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