Lost Children Archive

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION

FINALIST FOR THE 2020 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:

THE NEW YORK TIMES - TIME MAGAZINE - O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE - KIRKUS REVIEWS

In Valeria Luiselli's fiercely imaginative novel, a mother and father set out with their two children, a boy and a girl, driving from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet.

Through songs and maps and a Polaroid camera's lens, 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.