Faces in the Crowd

Valeria Luiselli’s crystalline debut is a surreal, enchanting novel about passion, identity, and the ghosts we carry. In New Mexico, a young mother feels trapped in a deteriorating marriage and drawn to revisit who she was before—when she edited in New York and rarely stayed in one place. As she folds time and seeks to inhabit her past, she begins to encounter ghosts. A solitary figure reappears—Gilberto Owen, a lesser known Harlem Renaissance poet who haunts her memories and sketches spectral visions of a young woman traveling alone on the subway. The narrative becomes a meditation on time, hauntings, and the elusive, transitory identities we assume.

The book blends memory and imagination to explore how the past shapes present longing and how art and life intersect across time. Valeria Luiselli is the author, with Christina MacSweeney as translator, and the work is presented in a concise, literary voice that invites reflection on desire, memory, and the rooms we occupy in more than one era.

• Surreal, time-folding novel about identity and ghosts
• Set around a young mother in New Mexico
• Encounters Gilberto Owen, Harlem Renaissance poet
• Themes: time, hauntings, transitory identities
• 160 pages, paperback, first edition
• Translation by Christina MacSweeney, Granta Books edition

The book in brief

A reflective, haunting meditation on how past selves linger in the present, and how literature can illuminate the elusive spaces between memory and desire.