We are delighted to announce that Valeria Luiselli has won the 2020 Rathbones Folio Prize for her third novel, Lost Children Archive. The novel follows a family in New York who set out on a road trip but is told poetically through multiple perspectives especially from the migrant children who take treacherous journeys across the U.S. border from Central America.
Heralded as ‘a mould-breaking new classic’ by the New York Times we are honoured to publish this book.
Paul Farley, the chair of judges, said: ‘In a year of brilliant books, Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli is our unanimous choice as winner of the 2020 Rathbones Folio Prize — and we’re all thrilled and delighted to be able to celebrate this genuinely original and bravura performance of a novel: a road trip, a documentary, a portrait of a family and of the American borderlands, and a journey into the idea of home and belonging doesn’t even begin to do justice to this singular, teeming, extraordinary book.’
Lost Children Archive is available to buy here.
As the weather gradually gets warmer and the sun creeps out from behind the clouds, it’s almost time to head into the garden with a book. With so many books published each month, it can be quite intimidating to decide what books to read first. Well, worry no further. We’ve got you sorted with everything we’re publishing from March to May. From the biggest book of the year and thrilling debuts, to moving memoirs and family history, 4th Estate has a book for everyone.
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In 2009, Hilary Mantel was an author already acclaimed for her fiction and memoir-writing, having been awarded, among other prizes, the MIND Book of the Year and the Cheltenham Prize, as well as being shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction. But the arrival of Wolf Hall would transform Mantel into a household name.
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Nothing makes a book more readable than discovering that a world a million miles away – or five hundred years ago – shares the same concerns as our own.
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The two Cromwell novels are teeming with dualities and divisions.
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Animals and their natural tendencies, a common feature of sixteenth-century allegory, pepper both novels, both in actual presence and rich metaphor.
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One of the many enjoyable aspects of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies is how touchable the world is within: how we can smell, taste and feel those lives of nearly five hundred years ago. The dark hallways and smoky fires, the splash of barge oars in the Thames, the soft leather of unthinking wealth.
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There are few figures in British history as universally reviled as Thomas Cromwell. Held responsible for the suppression of the monasteries, the destruction of countless priceless books deemed too ‘popish’ and the attacking of statues, shrines and rood screens across the country, Cromwell has traditionally been viewed as a reforming bulldozer, manipulating the King’s hand to achieve religious changes against the Catholic Church at any cost.
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