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In the summer of 2015, when thousands of children were arriving in the United States every month from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, the Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli volunteered as a court interpreter in New York, where she has lived for several years Working with non-profit organisation The Door, Luiselli interviewed applicants for asylum, recording the details of their passage through Mexico atop the network of freight trains known as ‘La Bestia’ The resulting essay, modelled on the intake questionnaire given to detainees – ‘Why did you come to the United States?’ – became a reflection on Luiselli’s own immigration process, as well as an attempt to redefine a ‘border crisis’ as a humanitarian one   It was a powerful account of both bureaucratic neglect and collective guilt, but it also left Luiselli, then the author of two slim novels and a collection of essays, with a difficult question of her own As an essayist, she found that the children’s stories resisted any tidy narrative order; the resulting book’s title, Tell Me How It Ends, came from a question frequently posed by her daughter, yet always left unanswered Was there a different way to approach the same subject as a writer of fiction? ‘If I did not write this particular story,’ she explains here, ‘it would not have made sense to return to writing anything else’ Nearly half a decade later, when the refugee crisis has not only worsened, but sunk to a level of cruelty previously unimaginable, Luiselli’s newest novel is a timely call to revive the socially conscious novel as a viable, morally urgent form, while also avoiding the pitfalls of its predecessors   Lost Children Archive is loosely based on a road trip Luiselli took with her family in 2014 Two oral historians travel through the American Southwest with their children, visiting the parts of the country that were ‘once Mexico’, as the mother explains, and coming across the deportation of several children from an airfield in Roswell, Texas As in Tell Me How It Ends, the narrator translates for a woman, Manuela,