Lost Children Archive. Barcelona: International Catalan Institute for Peace; Angle Editorial, 2024. Classics of Peace and Nonviolence, No. 23
Winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Dublin Literary Award, and the Folio Prize. Finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the Booker Prize, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Named one of the best books of the year by Time, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, GQ, O, The Oprah Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Chicago Tribune, NPR, and the New York Public Library, among others.
A couple with two children—aged five and ten—drive across the United States. Both are documentarians, travelling from New York to Arizona. Their destination: Apacheria, the last territory inhabited by the Apaches, the tribe the father is researching. The mother, in contrast, is interested in the thousands of migrant children who, alone and with little support, cross the Mexican border and venture dangerously into the U.S. desert in search of asylum.
As they travel through America’s ever-changing landscapes, from roadside motel to roadside motel, the parents realise a rift is opening between them. In the back seat, the children play, sing, and listen to their parents’ conversations and the news—until, in their imagination, the migration crisis and the genocide of Native Americans intertwine and propel them into an adventure with an uncertain outcome.
Straddling travel literature and exile literature, Valeria Luiselli has written a Great American Novel for our time: an emotional, moving, and multilayered work—where everything echoes another voice—about the fragility of family bonds, how we document and process our experiences, and what it means to be human in an unjust and unequal world.
The author, Valeria Luiselli
(Mexico City, 1983) The daughter of a diplomat, she spent her childhood in South Korea, South Africa, and India. She spent several years in Barcelona during her youth. She writes in both Spanish and English and is the most prominent voice among writers exploring the conflicts and contradictions of hybrid identity between Latin America and the United States. Translated into over twenty languages, Luiselli has won two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the Dublin Literary Award, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the American Book Award. She has also been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times, Granta, The Guardian, and El País. She lives in New York.
The translator, Elisabet Ràfols Sagués
A philologist from Barcelona, she has worked professionally in literary translation since the 1990s. She has translated works by John le Carré, Anthony Burgess, Julian Barnes, Patricia Highsmith, and Alan Bennett, among others. Since moving to Canada, she has translated extensively for the theatre, both in collaboration—bringing Catalan dramaturgy to Canada in French and English—and solo, with works by Carole Fréchette, Marie Clements, and others.
ICIP and the “Classics of Peace and Nonviolence” collection
This is the twenty-third title in the “Classics of Peace and Nonviolence” series, co-published with Angle Editorial. The collection seeks to contribute to the progressive establishment of a culture of peace and the eradication of sociopolitical violence. Together we have published around twenty books, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou; Thoreau: An Essential Biography by Antonio Casado da Rocha; Frames of War by Judith Butler; The Cry of Conscience by Martin Luther King Jr.; An Interrupted Life by Etty Hillesum; The Adventures of Wesley Jackson by William Saroyan; and Lay Down Your Arms! by Bertha von Suttner.