https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2019/dec/17/lost-children-archive-aliens-valeria-luiselli

Valeria Luiselli’s portrait of a family on a road trip from New York to Arizona points up how little separates them from the migrants heading the other way

Valeria Luiselli says that she began writing Lost Children Archive in July 2014, inspired by a road trip to the south-west of the US as the refugee crisis at the Mexican border was coming into visibility. “It became impossible to ignore the reality around me,” she said, and so she started writing.

But the project stalled. Perhaps not surprisingly, as Emma Brockes explained here at the start of the year, the book “started out as an angry screed, overly didactic and too bogged down in politics”. Luiselli told Brockes that she was using the book as “a vehicle for my own rage, stuffing it with everything from children’s testimonies to the history of American interventionism in central America … It just wasn’t working. There’s a different way of assuming a political sense in fiction, I think.”