ILFU Book Talk: Valeria Luiselli

Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli is our second ILFU Book Talk guest. She is widely regarded as one of the most innovative young authors from North en Central America. She had an international breakthrough with Faces In The Crowd (original title Los ingrávidos). Her new book Lost Children Archive was published recently and she will come over to Utrecht to talk about this impressive and widely acclaimed road novel. Tickets are now on sale now.

The story of Lost Children Archive

In this novel a Mexican-American family travels from New York to Arizona. As the family heads south, tens of thousands of children from Central America are on their way north, without their parents, looking for a chance of a better life. When the children of the family disappear, the two story lines seem to come together and become entwined.

In America, England as well as The Netherlands the novel received brilliant reviews:

‘Beautiful, pleasurable, engrossing, beguiling … brilliantly intricate and constantly surprising’ James Wood, New Yorker

‘A mould-breaking new classic … The novel truly becomes novel again in her hands – electric, elastic, alluring, new’ New York Times

‘Fascinating, haunting, poetic, engrossing … an involving and richly textured book’ Sunday Times

‘Valeria Luiselli offers a searing indictment of America’s border policy in this roving and rather beautiful form-busting novel. Among the tale’s many ruminative ideas about absences, vanished histories and bearing witness, it offers a powerful meditation on how best to tell a story when the subject of it is missing’ Daily Mail

About Valeria Luiselli

Valeria Luiselli lives and works in New York. Her debut Papeles Falsos achieved a cult status and with the novel Faces In The Crowd she had an international breakthrough. The United States’ migration policy is an important theme in her work. Luiselli’s short stories and essays were previously published in New York Times, El País and Das Magazin. 

Below please find the interview with PBS News Hour of March 6 about Lost Children Archive.