Shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize

From Booker Prize-winner and literary phenomenon Han Kang, a lyrical and disquieting exploration of personal grief, written through the prism of the color white

While on a writer’s residency, a nameless narrator wanders the twin white worlds of the blank page and snowy Warsaw. THE WHITE BOOK becomes a meditation on the color white, as well as a fictional journey inspired by an older sister who died in her mother’s arms, a few hours old. The narrator grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, an event she colors in stark white–breast milk, swaddling bands, the baby’s rice cake-colored skin–and, from here, visits all that glows in her memory: from a white dog to sugar cubes.

As the writer reckons with the enormity of her sister’s death, Han Kang’s trademark frank and chilling prose is softened by retrospection, introspection, and a deep sense of resilience and love. THE WHITE BOOK–ultimately a letter from Kang to her sister–offers powerful philosophy and personal psychology on the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.

About the Author

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HAN KANG was born in 1970 in South Korea. In 1993 she made her literary debut as a poet, and was first published as a novelist in 1994. A participant in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Han has won the Man Booker International Prize, the Yi Sang Literary Award, the Today’s Young Artist Award, and the Manhae Prize for Literature. She currently works as a professor in the department of creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.

Praise For…

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Advance praise for The White Book:

“A brilliant psychogeography of grief, moving as it does between place, history and memory… Poised and never flinches from serene dignity… The White Book is a mysterious text, perhaps in part a secular prayer book… Translated peerlessly by Smith, [it] succeeds in reflecting Han’s urgent desire to transcend pain with language.”
—Guardian

“With eloquence and grace, Han breathes life into loss and fills the emptiness with this new work.”
–Library Journal
 
“Everything I ever thought about the color white has been profoundly altered by reading Han Kang’s brilliant exploration of its meaning and the ways in which white shapes her world, from birth to death—including the death of The White Book’s narrator’s older sister, who died just a few hours after she was born, in her mother’s arms. This is an unforgettable meditation on grief and memory, resilience and acceptance, all offered up in Han’s luminous, intimate prose.”
—NYLON

“Han’s first two English-language translations (The Vegetarian and Human Acts) were instant sensations, establishing her as a riveting practitioner of the surreal and of historical fiction alike. Her latest to be translated by Deborah Smith is told by a woman haunted by the death of her elder sister just after birth — a contemplation of life, death, resilience and, as the title hints, color.”
—Huffington Post

“I adored Han Kang’s eerie English-language debut of denial, excess, and transformation, The Vegetarian, and I can’t wait to read her next tale, which promises to be equal parts Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, and something entirely Han Kang’s own. In The White Book, a writer in residency based in Warsaw contemplates the color white as a symbol for grief, for a quieter, yet just as intensely symbolic, follow-up to the startling violence of her first two books.”
—LitHub

“A quietly gripping contemplation on life, death, and the existential impact of those who have gone before.”
—Eimear McBride

“The White Book is a profound and precious thing, its language achingly intimate, each image haunting and true. It is a remarkable achievement. Han Kang is a genius.”
—Lisa McInerney

“Kang’s masterful voice is captivating and nothing short of brilliant.”
—Booklist (starred)

The extraordinary lost story of America’s invasion of Russia 100 years ago

*** In the brutally cold winter of 1919, 5,000 Americans battled the Red Army 600 miles north of Moscow. We have forgotten. Russia has not. ***

“INCREDIBLE.” — John U. Bacon • “AN EXCEPTIONAL BOOK.”  — Patrick K. O’Donnell • “A MASTER OF NARRATIVE HISTORY.”  — Mitchell Yockelson • “GRIPPING.” — Matthew J. Davenport • “FASCINATING, VIVID.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

An unforgettable human drama deep with contemporary resonance, award-winning historian James Carl Nelson’s The Polar Bear Expedition draws on an untapped trove of firsthand accounts to deliver a vivid, soldier’s-eye view of an extraordinary lost chapter of American history—the Invasion of Russia one hundred years ago during the last days of the Great War.

In the winter of 1919, 5,000 U.S. soldiers, nicknamed “The Polar Bears,” found themselves hundreds of miles north of Moscow in desperate, bloody combat against the newly formed Soviet Union’s Red Army. Temperatures plummeted to sixty below zero. Their guns and their flesh froze. The Bolsheviks, camouflaged in white, advanced in waves across the snow like ghosts.

The Polar Bears, hailing largely from Michigan, heroically waged a courageous campaign in the brutal, frigid subarctic of northern Russia for almost a year. And yet they are all but unknown today. Indeed, during the Cold War, two U.S. presidents, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, would assert that the American and the Russian people had never directly fought each other. They were spectacularly wrong, and so too is the nation’s collective memory.

It began in August 1918, during the last months of the First World War: the U.S. Army’s 339th Infantry Regiment crossed the Arctic Circle; instead of the Western Front, these troops were sailing en route to Archangel, Russia, on the White Sea, to intervene in the Russian Civil War. The American Expeditionary Force, North Russia, had been sent to fight the Soviet Red Army and aid anti-Bolshevik forces in hopes of reopening the Eastern Front against Germany. And yet even after the Great War officially ended in November 1918, American troops continued to battle the Red Army and another, equally formiddable enemy, “General Winter,” which had destroyed Napoleon’s Grand Armee a century earlier and would do the same to Hitler’s once invincible Wehrmacht.

More than two hundred Polar Bears perished before their withdrawal in July 1919. But their story does not end there. Ten years after they left, a contingent of veterans returned to Russia to recover the remains of more than a hundred of their fallen brothers and lay them to rest in Michigan, where a monument honoring their service still stands.

In the century since, America has forgotten the Polar Bears’ harrowing campaign. Russia, notably, has not, and as Nelson reveals, the episode continues to color Russian attitudes toward the United States. At once epic and intimate, The Polar Bear Expedition masterfully recovers this remarkable tale at a time of new relevance.

About the Author

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James Carl Nelson received the 2017 Marine Corps Heritage Foundation’s Colonel Joseph Alexander Award for Biography. He is the author of three acclaimed histories of the American experience in World War I: I Will Hold: The Story of USMC Legend Clifton B. Cates, from Belleau Wood to Victory in the Great War; Five Lieutenants: The Heartbreaking Story of Five Harvard Men Who Led America to Victory in World War I; and The Remains of Company D: A Story of the Great War. A former staff writer for the Miami Herald, he lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Praise For…

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“A master of narrative history, James Carl Nelson brings to light a long-forgotten story of America’s involvement during the Russian Civil War. The Polar Bear Expedition is exhaustively researched and rich in detail. A very fine book.”
— Mitchell Yockelson, author of Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing’s Warriors Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I

“I love untold stories and James Carl Nelson serves up a great one by bringing to light a forgotten period of American history. Using primary sources, he skillfully weaves together the story of the Polar Bears and their unsung expedition to Russia. The Polar Bear Expedition is an exceptional book that vividly evokes the drama, chaos, and stench of battle.”
— Patrick K. O’Donnell, bestselling author of The Unknowns: The Untold Story of America’s Unknown Soldier and WWI’s Most Decorated Heroes Who Brought Him Home

“James Carl Nelson masterfully tells the incredible story of ‘Detroit’s Own’ Doughboys, who were sent a thousand miles north of Moscow to battle the Bolsheviks in minus-60 degree winds. How most of these unsung heroes survived, how five ‘Polar Bears’ returned to reclaim those who didn’t a decade later, and how the ripples from that conflict washed right up to the 2016 election, are all mysteries Nelson solves. You’ll wonder why you’ve never heard of this amazing story before.”
— John U. Bacon, author of The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism

“With exceptional research and his proven story-telling brilliance, James Carl Nelson has brought us the gripping, untold true story of American soldiers fighting not on the Western Front but on the frozen battlefields of the Russian Civil War. The Polar Bear Expedition shines a long-overdue spotlight on one of the most neglected chapters of the First World War.”
— Matthew J. Davenport, author of First Over There: The Attack on Cantigny, America’s First Battle of World War I

“[An] engrossing narrative. … Crisp, character-driven.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Urgent. … A wild ride through an American military campaign few know much about. … Nelson does yeoman’s work in telling the stories of these men and their exploits.”
— Booklist

“Fast-paced. … Intimate. … Vivid, well-researched.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Nelson’s well-written and well-researched history brings this often overlooked war to life. … Intimate. … Heartbreaking. … The Polar Bear Expeditionis more than a great celebration of this little-known conflict.”
— New York Journal of Books

“If you enjoyed An American Marriage by Tayari Jones, read The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls…an absorbing commentary on love, family and forgiveness.”—The Washington Post  
 
One of the most anticipated reads of 2019 from Vogue, Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Buzzfeed, Essence, Bustle, HelloGiggles andCosmo!“The Mothers meets An American Marriage” (HelloGiggles) in this dazzling debut novel about mothers and daughters, identity and family, and how the relationships that sustain you can also be the ones that consume you.The Butler family has had their share of trials—as sisters Althea, Viola, and Lillian can attest—but nothing prepared them for the literal trial that will upend their lives.

Althea, the eldest sister and substitute matriarch, is a force to be reckoned with and her younger sisters have alternately appreciated and chafed at her strong will. They are as stunned as the rest of the small community when she and her husband Proctor are arrested, and in a heartbeat the family goes from one of the most respected in town to utter disgrace. The worst part is, not even her sisters are sure exactly what happened.

As Althea awaits her fate, Lillian and Viola must come together in the house they grew up in to care for their sister’s teenage daughters. What unfolds is a stunning portrait of the heart and core of an American family in a story that is as page-turning as it is important.

About the Author

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Anissa Gray is an Emmy and duPont-Columbia award-winning journalist at CNN Worldwide, responsible for helping to guide coverage of some of the most consequential stories of our time. She began her career at Reuters as a reporter, based in New York, covering business news and international finance. Born in St. Joseph, Michigan, Gray studied English and American literature at New York University. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her wife.

Praise For…

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An Indie Next, Library Reads, and Barnes & Noble Discover Pick!

“The inequities of the justice system, the fortitude of women of color, and the bittersweet struggle to connect are rendered ravishly in this bighearted novel.”—Oprah Magazine

“[An] intimate family saga sure to appeal to fans of Tayari Jones and Celeste Ng.”—Entertainment Weekly

“A poetically written story that guides us through a deep darkness toward a faint whisper of light seeping from beneath a closet door. A light that shows how love and forgiveness can come from unexpected places and triumph over more than we ever imagine.”—Delia Owens, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Where the Crawdads Sing

“I was immediately taken by the power and honesty of Anissa Gray’s voice. She is a writer to watch, and this debut is not to be missed!”—Terry McMillan, New York Times bestselling author of I Almost Forgot About You and Waiting to Exhale

“If you enjoyed An American Marriage, read The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls…an absorbing commentary on love, family and forgiveness.”—The Washington Post  
 
“As in Tayari Jones’s best-selling An American Marriage, Gray uses imprisonment as the backdrop for a disarmingly compelling story that skirts easy answers and sentimentality. Conversational in tone and difficult in subject, Care and Feeding tells not just an American story but several important ones.” —Vogue
 
“Gray’s absorbing novel is about family and the things we hunger for.”—Real Simple

“Anissa Gray’s debut is heralded as “The Mothers meets An American Marriage.” If that’s not enough to sell you on this stunning novel about family and relationships, we don’t know what will.” –HelloGiggles
 
“[A] stark, emotional story you don’t want to miss.”—Bustle

“A trio of sisters navigate the tricky waters of forgiveness in Gray’s heartfelt, beautifully written debut…Get an extra copy for your best friend or your own sister; this is one you’re going to want to talk about.”—Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author

“Gray beautifully captures the way strong women can piece a community back together, taking care of their loved ones while still figuring out how to care for themselves. A graceful debut that feels timely and important.”—Karin Tanabe, author of The Gilded Years

“This is perfect for fans of Brit Bennett’s The Mothers; readers will be deeply affected by this story of a family wrestling to support itself.”—Publisher’s Weekly

“Gray’s engrossing and moving debut novel considers secrets and lies and their effect on the families of three sisters.”—Booklist

“Gray manages a large cast of characters with ease, sharply differentiating between the voices of hardheaded Althea, shrewd Viola, and hesitating Lillian, who narrate the novel in alternating chapters.”—Kirkus

Set during the tumultuous middle of the George W. Bush years—amid the twin catastrophes of the Iraq insurgency and Hurricane Katrina—Landfall brings Thomas Mallon’s cavalcade of contemporary American politics, which began with Watergate and continue with Finale, to a vivid and emotional climax.

The president at the novel’s center possesses a personality whose high-speed alternations between charm and petulance, resoluteness and self-pity, continually energize and mystify the panoply of characters around him. They include his acerbic, crafty mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush; his desperately correct and eager-to-please secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice; the gnomic and manipulative Donald Rumsfeld; foreign leaders from Tony Blair to Vladimir Putin; and the caustic one-woman chorus of Ann Richards, Bush’s predecessor as governor of Texas. A gallery of political and media figures, from the widowed Nancy Reagan to the philandering John Edwards to the brilliantly contrarian Christopher Hitchens, bring the novel and the era to life.

The story is deepened and driven by a love affair between two West Texans, Ross Weatherall and Allison O’Connor, whose destinies have been affixed to Bush’s since they were teenagers in the 1970s. The true believer and the skeptic who end up exchanging ideological places in a romantic and political drama that unfolds in locations from New Orleans to Baghdad and during the parties, press conferences, and state funerals of Washington, D.C.

About the Author

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THOMAS MALLON is the author of ten novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, Fellow Travelers, and Watergate. Fellow Travelers has been made into a contemporary opera that is regularly performed throughout the United States. Mallon is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review, and in 2011 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style. He has been the literary editor of GQ and the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Praise For…

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“Entertainingly bitchy . . . Landfall is smart and knowing and absorbing.  It is to novels as good studio movies are to movies—extremely well-made, satisfying if you have a taste for [a] genre occasionally excellent.  The prose is a pleasure . . . Landfall is fascinating.” —Kurt Anderson, The New York Times Book Review

“As in Mr. Mallon’s many other novels, the writing is crisp and witty, the central characters complex and sympathetic in surprising ways, the narrative structure tight. . . [a] superbly written novel . . . Mr. Mallon has a gift”—The Wall Street Journal

“For lovers of American politics, a new novel by Thomas Mallon is always a mouth-watering prospect . . . Many of the characters from that era will be brought to life on the page with Mallon’s trademark wit and, crucially, no little sympathy.” —The National

“Fantastic . . . Mallon provides juicy, humanized depictions of interactions between the familiar talking heads of state . . . This novel makes a fascinating flesh-and-blood spectacle out of moments now relegated to history.”—Publishers Weekly

“It’s nice that we have a writer as skilled as Thomas Mallon to imagine [this] for us . . . At its best, Mallon’s amusing new novel, Landfall, operates like the thought-bubble we’d always wanted . . . Close readers might detect the faintest echo of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men . . .” —The Washington Post

“Mallon, a veteran of political fiction, has written a blackly comic novel . . .” —The New York Times

“[An] incisive insider’s view . . . Mallon demonstrates great skill in animating a large cast of prominent personalities . . . [this] latest fictional portrayal of the American political scene is impressively detailed and enticingly readable.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Remarkable . . . Mallon brings historical figures to life . . .” —BBC

“Marvelously detailed, often darkly funny, as informative as it is entertaining. Mallon may well be the 21st century’s Anthony Trollope.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Spectacular… moving, beautifully written, and a bona fide page-turner.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“An extraordinary book.” –Lauren Groff, author of Florida

Illuminating one of the great love stories of the twentieth century – Tennessee Williams and his longtime partner Frank Merlo – Leading Men is a glittering novel of desire and ambition, set against the glamorous literary circles of 1950s Italy

In July of 1953, at a glittering party thrown by Truman Capote in Portofino, Italy, Tennessee Williams and his longtime lover Frank Merlo meet Anja Blomgren, a mysteriously taciturn young Swedish beauty and aspiring actress. Their encounter will go on to alter all of their lives.

Ten years later, Frank revisits the tempestuous events of that fateful summer from his deathbed in Manhattan, where he waits anxiously for Tennessee to visit him one final time. Anja, now legendary film icon Anja Bloom, lives as a recluse in the present-day U.S., until a young man connected to the events of 1953 lures her reluctantly back into the spotlight after he discovers she possesses the only surviving copy of Williams’s final play.

What keeps two people together and what breaks them apart? Can we save someone else if we can’t save ourselves? Like The Master and The Hours, Leading Men seamlessly weaves fact and fiction to navigate the tensions between public figures and their private lives. In an ultimately heartbreaking story about the burdens of fame and the complex negotiations of life in the shadows of greatness, Castellani creates an unforgettable leading lady in Anja Bloom and reveals the hidden machinery of one of the great literary love stories of the twentieth-century.

About the Author

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Christopher Castellani is the author of three previous novels (the trilogy A Kiss from Maddalena, The Saint of Lost Things, and All This Talk of Love) and The Art of Perspective, a book of essays on the craft of fiction. He is the son of Italian immigrants, a Guggenheim fellow, and the artistic director of GrubStreet, one of the country’s leading creative writing centers. He lives in Boston.

Praise For…

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“Spectacular… Castellani’s novel hits the trifecta of being moving, beautifully written, and a bona fide page-turner. This is a wonderful examination of artists and the people who love them and change their work in large and imperceptible ways.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“Castellani . . . [injects] the book with a gravitas and a precariousness that recalls the authorial finesse of his own character, Tennessee Williams, harnessing a talent not only for forming tragic heroes, but allowing them to exhibit the kind of complexity that remains utterly real to readers, that mix of ambition and ambivalence that so often suggests the self who remains unknown to us, the parts of us which we ourselves cannot account for.” —Brooklyn Rail

“Leading Men is a finely-rendered narrative . . . broad in scope and lush in detail, without every tipping into sentimentality. [A] compassionate snapshot of a bygone era and a beautiful, if tragic, story of love and remembrance.” —Lambda Literary 

With imagination and feeling, Castellani reconjures history to reveal the intricate dynamics—loving and passionate, selfless and devastating—among artists and those who nurture them.
—Annie Bostrom, Booklist 

“An intriguing take on Tennessee Williams and his lover of 15 years, Frank Merlo . . . Humane, witty, and bold, this novel imagines the life of a loving but tortured couple.” —Kirkus Reviews 

“A moving story of love, loss, memory and regret . . . Leading Men is a transporting adventure.” —Shelf Awareness

“I read Christopher Castellani’s Leading Men in one quiet, sunny, rapt afternoon, and spent hours afterwards just stunned from having been immersed in such a tender, psychologically devastating, and gorgeously precise novel. An extraordinary book.” —Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furiesand Florida

“Leading Men is glorious, a meditation on the ravages of fame, an investigation into the private lives of public artists, and one of the most moving love stories I’ve read in ages. It’s hard to imagine better company on the page than Tennessee Williams and those who loved and loathed him. By bringing to life these literary visionaries, Christopher Castellani proves himself their eminently worthy heir.” —Anthony Marra, author of The Tsar of Love and Techno

“With echoes of Tender is the Night and The Sun Also Rises, Leading Men tells the extraordinary love story of Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo. Castellani elegantly weaves together Merlo’s final days with memories of a dramatic (and delicious) Italian summer in 1953 that changes his world forever. Throw in an aging Swedish actress, Truman Capote, Italian cinema and the staging (and script!) of a lost Williams play and you have all the ingredients for a literary page-turner. Leading Men is about fame and love and forgiveness, about the ravages of time, and how we try to lay claim to the future, while the present slips through our fingers.” –Hannah Tinti, author of The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“With extraordinary artistry and grace, Christopher Castellani interweaves history and invention to show us both the depths great artists are driven to and the love that draws them back. I know of few books that give such a moving account of the indispensable value of genius and its intolerable human cost. This is a novel of rare insight and beauty, and Castellani is a writer of brilliant gifts.” —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
“Leading Men is a daredevil of a novel, like the prettiest boy in the gay bar doing a backflip off a stool and not spilling his drink. Castellani has set his eye on that ineffable profane that is the other face of the divine, in a novel that unites my obsessions with Tennessee Williams, Luchino Visconti, Truman Capote, film, cruising, and Italy, and wraps it up in a love story, but a story of old love–love of a kind we almost never see written.” —Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night

“Leading Men is a novel as moving as it is entertaining, a book that restored my faith in the old cliche that only through fiction — by exploring the possibilities of what might have happened — can we reach the truth. Christopher Castellani has written an astounding novel of great imaginative empathy that, by the end, had this cynic weeping.” —Peter Orner, author of Love and Shame and Love

“Leading Men stirs up the kind of beautiful trouble we admire in the work of Tennessee Williams.  A clever, allusive, multi-layered novel filled with wit, insight, and heart. I loved it.” —Justin Torres, author of We The Animals

“This is a tale of love and loneliness, the personal costs of genius and its attendant fame, and of the ultimate, inconsolable pain of loss. In its depiction of Americans in Europe, its closest literary cousin might be F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.” —Library Journal

Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection–a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.

The Source of Self-Regard is brimming with all the elegance of mind and style, the literary prowess and moral compass that are Toni Morrison’s inimitable hallmark. It is divided into three parts: the first is introduced by a powerful prayer for the dead of 9/11; the second by a searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., and the last by a heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. In the writings and speeches included here, Morrison takes on contested social issues: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, “black matter(s),” and human rights. She looks at enduring matters of culture: the role of the artist in society, the literary imagination, the Afro-American presence in American literature, and in her Nobel lecture, the power of language itself. And here too is piercing commentary on her own work (including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, and Paradise) and that of others, among them, painter and collagist Romare Bearden, author Toni Cade Bambara, and theater director Peter Sellars. In all, The Source of Self-Regard is a luminous and essential addition to Toni Morrison’s oeuvre.

About the Author

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TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in New York.

Praise For…

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“Brilliantly incisive essays, speeches, and meditations considering race, power, identity, and art… Powerful, highly compelling pieces from one of our greatest writers.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

“Morrison turns a critical eye on race, social politics, money, feminism, culture, and the press, with the essential mandate that each of us bears the responsibility for reaching beyond our superficial identities and circumstances for a closer look at what it means to be human.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“Some superb pieces headline this rich collection…Prescient and highly relevant to the present political moment…”
—Publishers Weekly

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

From the two-time NBCC Finalist, an emotionally resonant, fiercely imaginative new novel about a family whose road trip across America collides with an immigration crisis at the southwestern border–an indelible journey told with breathtaking imagery, spare lyricism, and profound humanity.

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. Their destination: Apacheria, the place the Apaches once called home.

Why Apaches? asks the ten-year-old son. Because they were the last of something, answers his father.

In their car, they play games and sing along to music. But on the radio, there is news about an “immigration crisis”: thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States, but getting detained–or lost in the desert along the way.

As the family drives–through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas–we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. They are led, inexorably, to a grand, harrowing adventure–both in the desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations.

Told through several compelling voices, blending texts, sounds, and images, Lost Children Archive is an astonishing feat of literary virtuosity. It is a richly engaging story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most. With urgency and empathy, it takes us deep into the lives of one remarkable family as it probes the nature of justice and equality today.

About the Author

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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 winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and an American Book Award, and has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize. 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.

Praise For…

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“Impossibly smart, full of beauty, heart and insight, Lost Children Archive is a novel about archiving all that we don’t want to lose. Luiselli looks into the American present as well as its history: into Native American history, and the many intersections between American and Mexican history that are and have always been there. This is the perfect American road trip novel for right now. Everyone should read this book.” —Tommy Orange, author of There There 

“A gorgeous and vital ghost-rich soundscape, and one of the most brilliant portrayals of child-parent relationships I have ever read. Luiselli floods extraordinary light onto childhood, parenthood, the literary consciousness, and how we make sense of past and present pain. Lost Children Archive is one of the best novels I’ve read in recent years, and one of the most important.” —Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing With Feathers

“Luiselli writes with so much intelligence, compassion and originality, her work always astonishes me. Lost Children Archive is absolutely phenomenal.” —Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond 

“Engrossing…brilliantly intricate and constantly surprising—a passionately engaged book [with] intellectual amplitude and moral seriousness, [and] a beautiful, loving portrait of children and of the task of looking after them. It is a pleasure to be a part of the narrator’s family; just as pleasurable is the access we gain to the narrator’s mind—a comprehensive literary intelligence. A gripping and fantastical tale . . . an intensely allusive, beguiling mixture of the real and the doubly invented. Luiselli [is] playful and brave.” —James Wood, The New Yorker

“A highly imaginative, politically deft portrait of childhood within a vast American landscape—a rollicking tale that contains within it an extremely disciplined exercise in political empathy. Luiselli takes the minds of children seriously, and the reader witnesses their intelligent eyes and ears recording each detail of the borderlands and registering the full terror of them. Luiselli braids and reworks disparate texts . . . [characters’] experiences overlap to create a patchwork representation of how America might see itself. The novel’s most thrilling section [is] a single sentence sustained for some twenty pages near the end, which remains measured and crystalline, expertly controll[ed] . . . Luiselli shows the reader something she wouldn’t normally see, and also maps the past onto the present in ways that can reveal hidden contours in both.” —Lidija Haas, Harper’s 

“Remarkable, inventive. . . . A family treks south to the U.S.-Mexico border, bearing tales of the anguish of migrant families all the way down. The opening sections are thick with literary references and social critique; imagine On the Road rewritten by Maggie Nelson. But the story darkens as they witness the [families’] plight firsthand, and later, as the couple’s children stumble into their own crisis. As the novel rises to a ferocious climax, Luiselli thunderously, persuasively insists that reckoning with the border will make deep demands of our emotional reserves. A powerful border story, at once intellectual and heartfelt.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Superb, powerful, eloquent. Juxtaposing rich, poetic prose with direct storytelling, and alternating narratives with photos, documents, poems, maps, and music, LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE explores what holds a family and society together, and what pulls them apart. The novel begins with a family embarking on a road trip, and culminates in an indictment of the tragic shortcomings of the immigration process. Luiselli demonstrates how callousness toward other cultures erodes our own. Her novel makes a devastating case for compassion.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Poignant, intense, keenly timely . . . Luiselli is no stranger to inventive storytelling; [this] latest work is perhaps her most politically relevant. Stories of Latin American asylum seekers and the disappeared Apaches overlap and converge . . . This is one of few novels that fully and powerfully conveys the urgency of this unsettling situation.” —Booklist (starred review)