Tell Me How This Ends: A BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick

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With gifted prose and a compassionate but penetrating gaze, Luiselli personalizes the ongoing plight of Latin American child migrants in the United States. Her own immersion as a translator informs a trenchant first-hand account of the labyrinthine legal processes and inevitable bureaucratic indifference faced by undocumented youth. Humane yet often horrifying, Tell Me How It Ends offers a compelling, intimate look at a continuing crisis—and its ongoing cost in an age of increasing urgency.” —Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books 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

The next book to be featured on the Zoe Ball Radio 2 Book Club will be Tell Me How This Ends, the captivating debut novel by Jo Leevers. The book is released on 1 May and Jo will be on the show with Zoe on Tuesday 25 April. In an essay as bracing as it is searing, the incomparable Valeria Luiselli explores the 2014 immigration crisis. Luiselli writes with a clarity that underscores the nightmarish conditions and nonsensical bureaucracy undocumented children face on their passage to America and toward U.S. citizenship. Tell Me How It Ends evokes empathy as it educates. It is a vital contribution to the body of post-Trump work being published in early 2017.” —Katharine Solheim, Unabridged BooksIn Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions Mexican author Valeria Luiselli assumes a role not only as a ‘resident alien’ or interpreter but, more importantly, as a storyteller. She relays the crisis of undocumented youth so we might examine their present struggles and link them to our own inexplicable past.” —Houston Chronicle

I wish I could force every person who chants "build a wall" or asks "why can't they just come here legally" to read this book. The 40 questions from the title are those Luiselli asks of detained children as a volunteer interpreter in federal immigration courts, and she uses this structure to give a concise, impassioned plea for us to recognize these children for what they are -- refugees fleeing unimaginable violence, violence the US has had a significant hand in creating and inflaming. If you've read her fiction, you know she's a brilliant writer, but this is something more; it's gut-wrenching, of course, but it's also a reminder that we don't have any time to lose, and that even our small acts of compassion are crucial. ukrayna’dan göçen beyaz tenli sarışınlar makbul mülteci sayılırken afrikalılar, ortadoğulular ne olacak?

About the author

Afgelopen week hield de vraag me bezig waarom je ‘Vertel me het einde’ van Valeria Luiselli moest lezen. Of beter: ik wist wel waarom, maar hoe vertel ik het je? It begins with a very structured form of storytelling. It starts off easy and simple. But as Luiselli beings to involve herself further into their lives, the number of victims and their tragedies begin to weigh on her. The failure of our system to help these children is not surprising given the current state of our politics, but the artificial stigma that we’ve built up to dehumanize them dehumanizes us. Tell Me How It Ends itself is also a sharp, useful narrative, a ‘telling better.’ It can be pressed into hands, recommended, and it will open wallets and drive people into the streets to protest.” —Remezcla It's hard to believe this is a debut book. It reads with an effortless fluidity and the craftsmanship of a seasoned author. The characters and plot are complex and vivid. I was completely transported into their world and I felt all their emotions. It was well paced, disclosing its many layers slowly, as it drew me in further and further.

Tell Me How It Ends is a very short book that looks at migration as a source of hope, as well as a technical, bureaucratic process that eats up people (and children) caught in the trauma of trying to navigate it.” —GQ Naturally, Elizabeth decides Jude has nothing to give, that he's too scared to offer her anything other than a roll in the sheets, so she dives headfirst into a relationship with a nerdy student from her class--Ryan. Only, she comes to find out after their first night spent together that Ryan and Jude are actually brothers. Talk about surprises! She decides to go with the nice guy, Ryan. He is good and kind, and everything that she thinks she needs. Until she finds out that chemistry guy, Jude, is his brother.Tell Me How It Ends is a damning but deeply humane indictment of the narratives with which we’ve built America, both the stories we keep hidden and those we use to justify our cruelty. The experiences of the children Luiselli interviews demand that we complicate our own roles in the immigration crisis’s continent-wide affect; we can’t rewrite what these children have been through, but we must pursue more compassionate, more just stories of our own.” —The Riveter Tell Me How It Ends’ is all the more moving because Luiselli is so honest about the difficulties of writing these stories . . . What does activist writing, writing that wants to make a real difference, look like?” —The New Yorker So she instead documented her experiences and views in this essay, before working her experiences, including the gradual disintegration of her marriage which dated to the road-trip, into her brilliant literary novel Lost Children Archive. It is time for the rest of us to ask our own set of questions about what we expect from our government when it comes to protecting the welfare of vulnerable children. With the help of Tell Me How It Ends, we have more insight than ever into what those questions should be.” —Signature Tell Me How It Ends] is written from a transnational perspective, and all the more lucid for it.” —The Intercept

Je moet je documenteren voor je je mond opentrekt en een mening spuit. WoodsDoc dwingt me maandelijks tot stilstand, en door Luiselli lees ik het nieuws van vandaag op een andere manier. This essential book humanizes these young migrants, highlights the contradictions of the American Dream, and explores the fear and racism so prevalent for the people who try to make the U.S. their home.” —Literary Hub Unlike Henrietta, Annie is brimming with confidence―but even she has limits when it comes to opening up. Ever since that terrible night when her sister left a pile of clothes beside the canal and vanished, Annie has been afraid to look too closely into the murky depths of her memories. When her attempts to glide over the past come up against Henrietta’s determination to fill in the gaps, both women find themselves confronting truths they’d thought were buried forever―especially when Henrietta’s digging unearths a surprising emotional connection between them.I would suggest this as a weekend read or beach read. The book is easy to follow along with and I got totally lost in the book, which gave me trouble putting it down. I just wanted to know how it was all going to play out and what was going to happen. I would want to read this when you have more free time to read. Tell Me How It Ends is a slight book with a big impact. . . . It is long-form reporting, as well as a kind of memoir—and finally, in its coda, written after Trump’s election, it becomes a call to action.” —Financial Times unlike her novels, but also very much like her novels, this piece is afforded a considerable amount of brutality in its reading simply based off subject matter. not only is it concerned with our truly systemic horror show of an immigration system, but specifically it constricts the optic onto the way the system brutalizes migrant children. i cannot imagine the unending agony of working as a translator for spanish-speaking refugee children and maintaining an undue sense of distance and impartiality while assisting them through the bureaucratic grindings of gaining legal entry into the U.S. i feel personally compelled to thank her for doing such heartbreaking and necessary work, especially as she danced around her own slippery immigration status while awaiting her green card. this book was all heart. my heart flared up at her hushed advocacy for these children, for mitigating their pain during the most painful of journeys. my heart broke, became bandaged, became inflamed; it soared. 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