Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions

A searing, enlightening polemic about the tens of thousands of unaccompanied Mexican and Central American children arriving in the US without papers

‘It is not even the American dream they pursue, but rather a more modest aspiration: to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born.’

Why did you come to the USA?

When a child migrant arrives in the US all alone, this is the first question he or she will be asked.

It’s the beginning of an official interview of forty questions used by the federal immigration court in New York City where Valeria Luiselli works as a volunteer interpreter for the tens of thousands of children from Mexico and Central America being detained at the US border.

But nothing is ever that simple. The children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end …

‘The first must-read book of the Trump era’ Texas Observer

‘A remarkable little work that says more than books ten times its size’ GQ

‘With anger and lucidity, Luiselli depicts the nightmares these children are forced to flee in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, as well as the destructive ignorance and bigotry that awaits them in America’ Chicago Tribune

‘Harrowing, intimate, quietly brilliant’ New York Times

‘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