Tell Me How It Ends - by Valeria Luiselli (Paperback)

About the Book

A damning confrontation between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children seeking a new life in the US.

Book Synopsis

Structured around the forty questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear-both here and back home.

Winner of a 2018 American Book Award

Nonfiction Finalist for the Kirkus Prize

Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism

Review Quotes

"As in her hallucinatory and inventive fiction, Luiselli proves her skill as a storyteller while grappling with her own questions of nationalism." -The New Yorker

"Luiselli's awareness of a story's ability to restrict informs the book's judicious use of these children's lives, as well as its quietly brilliant structure as a series of responses to the questionnaire, which Luiselli describes as a reflection of 'a colder, more cynical and brutal reality.' . . . The account that emerges has no fixed origin, and the crisis, as Luiselli wisely points out, belongs not to any specific country or countries but to all of us living in this corner of the world." -New York Times Sunday Book Review

"This is a vital document for understanding the crisis that immigrants to the U.S. are facing, and a call to action for those who find this situation appalling." -Publisher's Weekly

"Luiselli effectively humanizes the plights of those who have been demonized or who have been reduced to faceless numbers . . . A powerful call to action and to empathy." -Kirkus

"These days, the whole world, including our politics, is being shaped by migration. Few people explore the nuances of this reality more skillfully than Valeria Luiselli, a strikingly gifted 33-year-old Mexican writer who knows the migratory experience first-hand. . . . Luiselli takes us inside the grand dream of migration, offering the valuable reminder that exceedingly few immigrants abandon their past and brave death to come to America for dark or nasty reasons. They come as an expression of hope." -NPR

"Tell Me How It Ends draws from Luiselli's experience working as an interpreter for child migrants and is structured around the questionnaire she would guide them through. The contrast between the intimacy of their experiences and the impersonality of the system they've been thrown into illuminates the horrors of our immigration system." -Literary Hub

"Valeria Luiselli's latest book, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, is unsparing in its portrayal of vulnerability and determination." -Rolling Stone

"This moving, intimate narrative about the mi

About the Author