Reader Score
78%
78% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 39 reviews on
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
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.
This is one of the books featured in the second season of White Lotus... "The first season’s tomes were aspirational props, but the second’s are more like warning signs."
🌻 agenting things @ymuliterary 🌸 busy listening to BTS 🌷 (she/her) views my own ✌🏼
Ambitious in its execution, it is extraordinarily accomplished. There is grace in its profundity ... It soars, it sings, it tantalises you when you dare slip away from its pages. How else can I say it is brilliant?
An editorially driven pedagogic platform that publishes critical writing around lens-based art, photography, media, and cinema from South Asia.
This week's book rec for ASAP Fiction is Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, which traces a family's road trip from New York City to the Mexican Border, as they seek answers & signs of the histories and contemporary instruments of deportation and displacement. https://t.co/IfgwaYSALo
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION
WINNER OF THE FOLIO PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE
"Impossibly smart, full of beauty, heart and insight. Everyone should read this book."
--Tommy Orange, author of There There
"A Great American Novel for our time."
--Vanity Fair
"Unforgettable, down to its explosive final sentence. . . . [Luiselli] audaciously stretches the bounds of storytelling."
--Entertainment Weekly
"Virtuosic. . . . The brilliance of the writing stirs rage and pity. It humanizes us."
--The New York Times Book Review
"This is a novel that challenges us, as a nation, to reconcile our differences. . . . [The] writing shimmers like its desert setting."
--The Washington Post
"Electric, elastic, alluring, new."
--The New York Times
"A remarkable feat of empathy."
--NPR
"[A] brilliantly intricate and constantly surprising book."
--The New Yorker
"[Luiselli's] language is so transporting, it stops you time and again."
--O, The Oprah Magazine
"Like all great novels. . . . Lost Children Archive is unquestionably timely, [but] it also approaches a certain timelessness."
--Los Angeles Times
"Stunning. . . . Uniquely rewarding--and even life-changing."
--The Seattle Times
"Delicate, funny, effortlessly poetic."
--The Guardian
"Passionate."
--The New York Review of Books
"Rollicking. . . A highly imaginative and politically deft portrait of childhood within a vast American landscape."
--Harper's Magazine