Virtual Gliterary Lunch Hour with Jeanine Cummins

American Dirt
Jeanine Cummins

The Author

Jeanine Cummins was born in Spain, lived in Belfast and then New York but now calls Maryland home . She studied creative writing at Towson University, spent ten years working in the publishing industry and is the author of bestselling A Rip in Heaven. AMERICAN DIRT has been optioned for film by Imperative Entertainment  with screenwriter, Charles Leavitt (Blood Diamond).

Praise for Jeanine Cummins

‘This tough, powerful novel is an eye opener. It made me understand better why someone would give up the home they know and love to survive, and the grit required to cross that border. It is essential reading for our time’.  Tracy Chevalier

The Book

‘Migrants are people. They are people, they are people, they are people’. Jeanine Cummins.

Lydia Quixano Perez runs a bookstore in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She has a delightful son and a wonderful husband who is a journalist and while there are cracks beginning to show in the city because of the drug cartels, her life is comfortable.

But that was yesterday. Today, Lydia and eight-year-old Luca have been forced to flee, leaving behind their middle-class existence. Instantly transformed into migrants, Lydia and Luca join countless people trying to reach el norte riding la bestia―trains that make their way north toward the United States.

A literary page-turner filled with poignancy and drama, American Dirt is a work of fiction inspired by the truth of the hundreds of migrants illegally crossing the US-Mexican border.