The debut novel: Faces in the Crowd

Age at time of publication (2012): 28

Valeria Luiselli was one of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 honorees in 2014, and has been praised as "an extraordinary new literary talent" by the Daily Telegraph and "an exciting and essential voice on the Latin American literary landscape" by the Los Angeles Times (Hector Tobar). Faces in the Crowd is an examination of the ghosts that haunt us, the remnants of loss we encounter daily — the dual story of a woman in Mexico City writing a novel about her experiences as a translator in New York, and the obscure Mexican poet whose works she was desperate to translate and publish.