Valeria Luiselli though Mexican by birth is a global wanderer by upbringing and her empathy with childhood displacement is profound. Her story-or rather her multiple stories-tells of departures, journeys, searches: a family’s for a new life, a woman’s for an independent path, a man’s for fulfillment of an obsession, mother’s for their children, children for salvation in a new world, children for the attention of their own parents. Weaving these narratives in a novel which grows increasingly desperate and frightening in a scheme she rips both from the headlines of our border tragedies with Mexico and from Ovid, Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound among others, she is deft stylistically and also heart wrenching. If you have time for one deep read in contrast to American Dirt, this should be it.