'Deserves a place alongside the strongest in the genre.By the book’s end, it’s impossible to not be rooting for. 'Markham recreates each step of the story in rich detail.Powerful.' - Pacific Standard “Painstakingly reported…A compassionate look at the lives of two young men and the family they left behind when they were seventeen years old… book could not have come at a more relevant time.” - Mother Jones 'An indelible picture.of one imperfect family driven apart and astray -not by inequality or lax enforcement, but by the humanitarian crisis of gang warfare.' - Vulture

“This is the sort of news that is the opposite of fake…Markham is our knowing, compassionate ally, our guide in sorting out, up close, how our new national immigration policy is playing out from a human perspective.An important book.” - The Minneapolis Star Tribune It’s about teenagers who raise themselves.' -Jennifer Senior, The New York Times In many ways, her book is reminiscent of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family.

Markham brings people and places to rumbling life she has that rare ability to recreate elusive, subjective experiences-whether they’re scenes she never witnessed or her characters’ interior psychological states-without taking undue liberties. ' The Far Away Brothers is impeccably timed, intimately reported and beautifully expressed. ANTHONY LUKAS BOOK PRIZE | LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/BOGRAD WELD PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW | WINNER OF THE RIDENHOUR BOOK PRIZE | SILVER WINNER OF THE CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD | FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE | SHORTLISTED FOR THE J. With intimate access and breathtaking range, Markham offers an unforgettable testament to the migrant experience. Soon these unaccompanied minors are navigating school in a new language, working to pay down their mounting coyote debt, and facing their day in immigration court, while also encountering the triumphs and pitfalls of teenage life with only each other for support. In this urgent chronicle of contemporary immigration, journalist Lauren Markham follows the Flores twins as they make their way across the Rio Grande and the Texas desert, into the hands of immigration authorities, and from there to their estranged older brother in Oakland, CA. Growing up in rural El Salvador in the wake of the civil war, the United States was a distant fantasy to identical twins Ernesto and Raul Flores-until, at age seventeen, a deadly threat from the region’s brutal gangs forces them to flee the only home they’ve ever known. The deeply reported story of identical twin brothers who escape El Salvador's violence to build new lives in California-fighting to survive, to stay, and to belong.

The Far Away Brothers by Lauren Markham