Author(s): Valeria Luiselli

Novel | Translated fiction | Mexico

Valeria Luiselli's crystalline debut: a surreal, enchanting novel about passion, identity, and the ghosts we carry. In New Mexico, she is a young mother. Stuck in a marriage that's deteriorating, unable to shake the feeling that her house and belongings are trapping her, she is increasingly drawn to reflect on who she was before: when she worked as an editor in New York, rarely in her own apartment, always seeking new places to call home. As she folds time, seeking to inhabit her past, she begins to encounter ghosts. Time and again, a solitary man appears - Gilberto Owen - a lesser known poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and an obsession of her youth. He is living on the edge of Harlem's social scene at the beginning of the Great Depression, anticipating death, and tracing spectral visions of his own - among them, a young woman, travelling alone, on the subway. Valeria Luiselli's daring debut, Faces in the Crowd is a meditation on time, hauntings, and the elusive, transitory identities we assume.

Review: A brilliant, short novel... Dreamlike, phenomenally structured and a powerful of being a writer and mother at the same time -- Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist
Valeria Luiselli is a precociously masterful, entirely original writer -- Francisco Goldman
A young Mexican author with seemingly boundless intellect... There are echoes of Garcia Marquez's Strange Pilgrims; Bolano, Hemingway and Emily Dickinson are all freely cited... Luminous -- Catherine Taylor * Guardian *
Spare, strange and beautiful... an extraordinary new literary talent -- Hermione Hoby * Daily Telegraph *
A remarkably confident novel... Confident in its handling of the ambitious ideas that crackle through its voices, in its complex structure and the daring intimacy of its field of vision... [the language is] sometimes sharp-edged, sometimes playful, and consistently effective -- Daniel Hahn * Independent *
A sexy, surreal debut... go with the flow and you get a multi-level satire on literary fame as well as the joy of a livewire imagination uninhibited by the demands of plot -- Anthony Cummins * Metro *
I loved its quiet desperation and its exploration of translations and disappearances. Wonderful -- Peter Florence, director of Hay Literary Festival, English PEN Atlas Translated Books of the Year

Author Biography: VALERIA LUISELLI was born in Mexico City in 1983. She is the author of The Story of My Teeth and Lost Children Archive, which won the Rathbones Folio Prize and was longlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Women's Prize, as well as Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and the essay collection Sidewalks.