Hello I'm Jeanine Cummins. This is my new novel, American Dirt. It's the story of
Lydia Perez, who is a bookseller in Acapulco, Mexico. She has a comfortable
middle-class life, she has a wonderful marriage and a beautiful little boy,
eight-year-old Luca. And then one day there is an unspeakable act of violence
that befalls her family. And sort of in an instant Lydia becomes a migrant, she
falls out of her middle-class life and discovers that she is among the
invisible people. And so really this book, American dirt, is the story of Lydia's
journey across Mexico with her eight-year-old son and their efforts to
get to the relative safety of the United States of America. You know it's the
story of how a middle-class woman finds herself in a position where she sort of
instantly becomes a person whose human rights are inconsequential and it's also
the story of all the people she meets along the way. Other migrants who are
potentially what readers will probably think of as more typical migrants,
younger Central American characters who are also trying to get to the United
States. And they're all running from various things, various problems, violence,
poverty; and they're all hoping for a better life and a welcome in the United States.
So I'm here in Waterstones Piccadilly and I would like to share
with you three of my favorite books; the first of which is The Round House by
Louise Erdrich. Louise is an incredible writer, she's a Native American writer,
she won the National Book Award for a previous book but this is the one of her
books that spoke the most deeply to me personally. I mean all of her books are
sort of about family and redemption and how we survive things that feel
unsurvivable. This book in particular, the narrator is a 13 year
old boy his mother has just suffered a horrific
trauma. So it really feels to me like it's the story of this kid who has to
sort of grow up overnight because of what's happening in his family. And it's
also the tale of how proximity to trauma can be its own kind of trauma. And yet no
one in this book is broken. It's sort of how they survive, I mean maybe that's
not entirely true, but it's the survival tactics of how they pull
together as a family and how they sometimes let each other down as a
family in the aftermath of this horrible, horrible thing that happens. And it's
just a very beautiful book. I finished it on an airplane as I was coming home from
some business trip somewhere and when I got off the plane I had to go to my car
and sit there for a half an hour before I could drive myself home because I was
just so overwhelmed by the incredible emotions in this book. So you should all read it.
So this is book number two, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia
Marquez. Everyone loves this writer but most people will tell you that 100 Years
of Solitude is his greatest masterpiece. And they are wrong. This book, Love in the
Time of Cholera is such a beautiful book. I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez's
language, the way he uses words. He can pack like fifty or a hundred words into
one sentence and never lose you, his language is just so beautiful and
stunning. And there's something so incredibly redemptive about this book.
It's the story of a young man and young woman who sort of fall in love with each
other and then the young woman recognizes that it's actually just a
crush and she goes and marries someone else and then the young man sort of goes
off the rails and spends his entire life kind of being a maniac because he just
is regretful about losing this woman.
And I won't give away what happens in the end but let's just say that Marquez shows us
that one should never give up hope. So it's a really great book and also read
One Hundred Years of Solitude, but this is the real one, this is the real one.
So for my last choice we've come upstairs to the young adult section and I'm super
envious of you if you have not read this book yet because you have such an
adventure ahead of you. Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry. This is a book that probably
more than any other book is responsible for my life as a writer. I read this book
when I was in sixth grade in the United States, which is I guess 11/12 years old.
And it absolutely blew my mind. I think it changed my life.
It's the story of a family living in the deep south after slavery and the way
they encounter and face racism in their community. But the really incredible
thing about this book is that Mildred D Taylor puts you inside the skin of these
characters in a way that just absolutely makes you feel like, not just that you
have simple empathy for them, but that you are living their experiences. And
when I finished reading this book I felt as though I was Cassie Edwards, I was
that little girl, that I fully understood the sort of rigours and horrors of racism
in the United States and and how much people have had to endure and continue
to have to endure in our country based on the colour of their skin. But really
also that makes it sound like a really serious book and it is, there's a lot of
heavy lifting in this book, but it's also just like this beautiful story of this
family and these characters that you come to love. So read it and make sure
all the children in your life also read it, it's a wonderful book.