American Dirt
Jeanine Cummins, 2020
Historical fiction Contemporary fiction
A bookseller and her son flee Mexico for the US after violence destroys their life, carrying only fear and each other. A thriller about survival, motherhood, and the price of sanctuary.
Feels like serenity. About memory.
A page from the book
What trauma does to a mind that finally stops moving.
Trauma waits for stillness. Lydia feels like a cracked egg, and she doesn’t know if she’s the shell or the yolk or the white. She is scrambled. Jeanine Cummins.Oprah Winfrey chose American Dirt for her book club in January 2020, just as a fierce debate erupted over who gets to tell migration stories.
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Questions readers ask
- What is American Dirt like?
- Feels like serenity. About memory.
- What should I read after American Dirt?
- If you liked American Dirt, try Inferno (Dan Brown), The Last Thing He Told Me (Laura Dave) and Dark Lover (J.R. Ward).
A taste of the feed
The geography of a nightmare, mapped in blood and bodies.
Langdon took a step toward the river, but he could see the waters were bloodred and too deep to traverse. When Langdon raised his eyes again to the veiled woman, the bodies at her feet had multiplied. There were hundreds of them now, maybe thousands, some still alive, writhing in agony, dying unthinkable deaths . . . consumed by fire, buried in feces, devouring one another. He could hear the mournful cries of human suffering echoing across the water.
Inferno · Dan Brown
How a tragedy hides inside an ordinary Tuesday.
This is the terrible thing about a tragedy. It isn’t with you every minute. You forget it, and then you remember it again.
The Last Thing He Told Me · Laura Dave
What a crowd looks like from the edge of someone else's death.
In her time as a reporter, she’d found that murder was a community event in Caldwell. Well, certainly for everyone except the man or woman who’d actually done the dying. For the victim, she had to imagine death was an alone kind of thing, even if he or she were staring into the face of the killer. Some bridges you crossed on your own, no matter who drove you to the edge.
Dark Lover · J.R. Ward
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