A novel of terror and hope on the Mexican-American border

Lydia and Luca are hiding in the shower room of their home while 16 members of her family are murdered. Lydia’s husband, a journalist, wrote about the latest drugs cartel in Acapulco and now, to stay alive, the mother and small son must disappear to America. Instead of the middle-class life Lydia has enjoyed as a bookshop owner, she and Luca must become one of those nameless, desperate migrants against whom President Trump vows to build his wall.

So begins Jeanine Cummins’s third novel, and if you think this is another Roma-style examination of the lives of poor Mexicans, think again. Cummins, who is not Mexican, says in her Afterword that she wishes this story had been written by someone who is (and indeed, the great thriller writer Don Winslow has already explored the cartels in his novels). There have been vociferous complaints of cultural appropriation and gross misrepresentation of its subjects in, most notably, the New York Times. Cummins certainly tries hard to spread her sympathies. In American Dirt even the most brutal criminals are educated and civilised: Javier, the head of the cartel, is a serious reader, the only other person who values the ‘secret treasures’ in Lydia’s bookshop, and she believed they were soulmates.

Now, because of the newspaper article, Javier has put a price on their heads. Yet if Lydia and Luca are to escape in an age of mobile phones, she must use every ounce of her cunning and instinct. Despite a university degree and her life savings, she has ‘no access to the kind of information that has real currency on this journey’: how to jump onto the roof of La Bestia, the lethal freight trains travelling north, how to find a trustworthy coyote to smuggle them into America, how to avoid notice and keep on running.