Lost Children Archive

By: Valeria Luiselli

Narrated by: Kivlighan de Montebello

Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

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. A mother, a father, a boy and a girl, they head southwest, to the Apacheria, the regions of the US which used to be Mexico. They drive for hours through desert and mountains. They stop at diners when they’re hungry and sleep in motels when it gets dark. The little girl tells surreal knock knock jokes and makes them all laugh. The little boy educates them all and corrects them when they’re wrong. The mother and the father are barely speaking to each other.

Meanwhile, thousands of children are journeying north, travelling to the US border from Central America and Mexico. A grandmother or aunt has packed a backpack for them, putting in a Bible, one toy, some clean underwear. They have been met by a coyote: a man who speaks to them roughly and frightens them. They cross a river on rubber tubing and walk for days, saving whatever food and water they can. Then they climb to the top of a train and travel precariously in the open container on top. Not all of them will make it to the border.

In a breathtaking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive intertwines these two journeys to create a masterful novel full of echoes and reflections - a moving, powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.

©2019 Valeria Luiselli (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

"Thrilling...a rollicking tale that contains within it an extremely disciplined exercise in political empathy." (Harper’s)

"A novelist of a rare vitality." (Ali Smith)

"Powerful, eloquent. Juxtaposing rich poetic prose with direct storytelling and brutal reality and alternative narratives with photos, documents, poems, maps and music, Luiselli explores what holds a family and society together and what pulls them apart. Superb." (Publishers Weekly)

Disappointing

The subject matter seems really interesting and topical but sadly I couldn’t get beyond the first couple of chapters. I was irritated by the narration, which was dull and deadpan and the way the author continuously referred to the children as ‘the boy’ and ‘the girl’ only served to put me off. A book needs to draw you in, to keep you interested until the end. This book fell very short for me in that regard.

So engaging, but too long

I think this had the potential to be a masterpiece. Luiselli’s capacity to capture children’s voices is breathtaking. I think it needed to be cut by at least a third though. The length diminished its power.

A tour de force

This may sound like hyperbole but it really isn’t. It is a genuine masterpiece, as a story in its own right and as a recording. It is both current and timeless, personal and epic, realistic and allegorical, sentimental and clinical. None of these are easy balances to strike but here it’s made to look so easy. I wholeheartedly recommend it, and it’s one of the best literary purchases I’ve made in a while. I don’t know if it’ll win The Booker Prize, or even if it’ll make the shortlist. But it absolutely deserves to. And I’m glad it made the long list because I probably wouldn’t have read it otherwise, and my life would have been just that little less rich.

Such an important book for such a time as this.

This book is beautifully written, utterly disturbing and exceptionally important in this world of refugee phobia.

Good narration but I found this tough going

Good narration but a book and plot that endlessly folds in on itself, echoes of echoes of echoes. It works up to a point but ultimately lost me

Lose Yourself In This Life Story

The story of a couple coming together, inheriting and having a child. Working with a passion for sound and language the family make their long way across America, so close in their car and yet generations apart. All the time, the parallels of people, adult and children, past and present making their own journeys to the border.
Ever seeking, ever enduring the torturous paths leading to their dreams.
Always compelling: always unveiling the trials of life.
Powerful writing that has left me inquisitive, wondering and wrestling with my thoughts.

great read

absorbing, lyrical, important, engaging, challenging, prescient, not flawless but then is any book really flawless.

Promising idea. Uneven execution

A promising start tracking the slow disintegration of a couple mirroring America's decline as a fading empire. Overtime, this descends into a paint by numbers post-modern checklist with little reward. Politically it becomes defanged. Creatively it becomes plodding.

The description of the couple's relationship under strain as they go about their journey is fantastically well drawn with plenty of flickers of light and dark.

Interesting story of immigration & it’s dangers

This was a NetGalley book that I forgot I had, and ended up listening to with my Audible credit 🤷🏼‍♀️ Anyway, I thought it lent itself really well to audio, particularly as the main adult characters, the mother and father, work in sound. The father creates soundscapes, and the mother interviews people.

The parents are clearly at odds with one another, both wanting to progress their careers in different ways. The father wants to make a soundscape of Apacheria where the last tribes had lived, and the mother wants to help a friend to find her lost children. They had been sent to the US with a coyote (a guide), had been found and sent to a detention centre - but they had subsequently gone missing. The mother discovers that these lone children have been disappearing on this journey for a long time.

The lost children hits close to home when the parents own children go missing.

I really enjoyed this. I loved how the two stories - the journey of the children, and that of the children in the mothers book who are being smuggled from Mexico - were intertwined. I enjoyed the way that the narratives swapped between the mother, the boy and the immigrant children, although the lines often became blurred between reality and the mothers novel.

It is in parts both devastating and informative, particularly in the times that we live in. This isn’t an easy book, but its well worth the read/ listen.

interesting and emotional.

great narration of an original and interesting storyline. loved the 4 main characters. they had real personalities

Stunningly brave

A totally immersive experience. The writer manages to pull off combining a family road trip with echoes of past present and future lost peoples.
Heart wrenchingly brutal in its approach to Mexican migrant children lost on the journey to the U.S border.

Sublime: moving, beautiful & important

I was blown away by this - the writing is beautiful, the story is moving & important & the performance- with the author reading for the point of view if the narrator, for most of the book, is intimate.