To those who have been trying to cross to the US, who have been interned, have lost their children, or encountered other forms of desperation. We realise that these people who have become our intimates are equally close to the “alien” families who feature on the fringes of the novel. Police and authority figures start to exude menace. People go silent when they learn that the narrator is Mexican. As the family go further south, they encounter increasing hostility and danger. Which makes it all the more jolting when Luiselli reminds us that there are also crucial differences. Their intimate bickering, their jokes and their conversations about audiobooks make them feel close to exactly the kind of literate reader you might expect to pick up a book like this one. This bridge to the migrant crisis is strengthened as we follow the family on a road trip from New York to Arizona. Passages that help remind us that those lost little ones in the title are not statistics, or dots moving around the map, or bureaucratic expenses. This is one of several lovely (not to mention amusing) depictions of the narrator’s two sleeping children. They occupy the entire space in the back of the car, spread out, limbs offering, heavy and placid.” Boy and girl, foreheads pearled with sweat, cheeks red and streaked white with dry spit. The opening pages of the finished novel suggest that she found her way by focusing on the human and the personal: “Mouths open to the sun, they sleep. She wrote a book of essays that articulated some of her anger – and then returned to her story in time for publication this year.
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