Lost Children Archive
VALERIA LUISELLI
(Audible, £11.99)

A New York couple bundle their children into a car and set out on a road trip across America. What could be more American than that? Yet this is also a journey that explores the brutality of America, both now and in the past.

Valeria Luiselli’s Booker 2019 long-listed novel is autofiction, fiction blended with autobiography; the journey she recounts was documented in her earlier (non-fiction) book Tell Me How It Ends. Though the mother in this novel’s family has a different career from Luiselli’s (she is a sound archivist rather than a writer), she shares the same mission: to ­collect material about migrant children who go missing on their perilous illegal journeys into the US. Her husband has his own quest: to research the history of the Apache, the native tribe that held out longest against white domination. The cruelty shown to that minority group is a constant backdrop to the cruelty suffered by migrant children in the present.