Solito
The New York Times Bestseller
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Solito is my travel book of the year.' Telegraph
'Heartbreaking… A rare, eye-opening rendition of the brutal reality of border-crossing.' Lea Ypi
‘If there’s any justice, Solito will someday be considered a classic.’ Rumaan Alam
Young Javier dreams of eating orange sherbet ice cream with his parents in the United States. For this to happen, he must embark on a three-thousand-mile journey alone. It should last only two weeks. But it takes seven.
In limbo, Javier learns what people will do to survive – and what they will forfeit to save someone else. This is a memoir of perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, and pointed guns. But it is also a story of tasting tacos for the first time, of who passes you their water jug in the crippling heat, and of longing to be in your mother’s arms.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Zamora (Unaccompanied) presents an immensely moving story of desperation and hardship in this account of his childhood migration from El Salvador to the U.S. To reunite with his parents—who left during the Salvadoran Civil War—nine-year-old Zamora was forced to rely on the help of coyotes to get to America in 1999. But, as he relates in affecting detail, the voyage for his group was perilous and trust was a rare commodity. What was supposed to be an easy two-week trip became a two-month nightmare pocked with seedy characters, days spent locked in various hideouts before moving, and a never-ending stream of promises shattered. Between dangerous marches through the desert and being caught at the U.S. border multiple times, Zamora's group was forced to depend on one another for survival. The surrogate family they formed offered Zamora respite from the despair, and he transforms the experience into a stirring portrait of the power of human connection. Rendering the end of their journey in a final heartbreaking scene, Zamora writes, "I can feel my heart in my stomach... I close my eyes and take a long sniff. Their sweat, the smell of loroco and masa, is faint, but it's them." This sheds an urgent and compassionate light on the human lives caught in an ongoing humanitarian crisis.
