Solito
A Memoir
by Javier Zamora
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Pub Date Sep 22 2022 | Archive Date Sep 29 2022
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Description
‘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.
Advance Praise
‘This is a magnificent book. Every character is rendered with boundless care and love, and the result is… a gorgeous, riveting tale of perseverance and the lengths humans will go to help one another in times of struggle. With this book, Zamora arrives at the forefront of essential American voices.’ Dave Eggers, author of The Circle
‘Solito is at once blistering and tender, devastating and affirming – it is, quite simply, a revelation, a new landmark in the literature of migration, and in nonfiction writ large.’ Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780861544769 |
| PRICE | £18.99 (GBP) |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Nina J, Reviewer
Oh my word! What an engrossing, compelling book, that I can't leave behind in my mind and heart.
Solito tells the autobiographical story through a 9 year old's voice, of the anticipation of leaving the country he has always known, El Salvador, to try to reach his parents who migrated to the US for political reasons when he was almost too young to remember.
We get to know him in his daily simple life living with his grandparents and cousin, hoping that one day he will be old enough to make the risky, illegal journey across 4 countries to be reunited with his parents. He excitedly awaits this adventure, but it doesn't dawn on him until the big day, that he will leave behind everything and everyone he knows and loves, and - scariest of all - that he will undertake the journey alone among a group of strangers.
What he also cannot know is that the strangers will become his new temporary family, with whom he will share fear, excitement, risk, danger, new foods - and come to trust and love as his own kin.
This story is packed full of adventure and emotion, a traveller's delight, and anyone who knows Central America will be transported to its shores through Javier Zamora's talented descriptions, references to food, surroundings and music.
I felt I travelled every step with him. He lived through a massive life-changing experience and it must have formed his character and traumatised him immensely. Javier - please write more books, I cannot wait to read the sequel.
This is the best work I have read this year, I urge you to READ THIS BOOK.
Jenny H, Reviewer
Survival against the odds. An amazing story based on a gruelling journey made by the author as a young boy from El Salvador to California to live with his parents, who had migrated there a few years before. Along the way, there's treachery and friendship, thirst and hunger but it's the kindness of strangers you remember most. The best book I've read in a long time.
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