Tell Me How This Ends: A BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick

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Well, that’s what I think. Friendship is when you can spend time with others and you feel happy doing it. When you enjoy spending time with someone. In comparison to…” It sounded as if Marin wanted to continue, but stopped themself. “If you want, we can be friends.” This features Henrietta, who takes up a new job interviewing people at the end of their lives and then turning their life stories into books for their families to keep. One of her clients is Annie, whose sister Kath disappeared, presumed drowned, when they were teenagers. Annie's husband died a couple of years ago, but she seems less troubled about that. Henrietta determines to find out what happened to Kath, and along the way she finds a friend in Annie and reveals some secrets about her own past.

When it comes to friends, it can be a day or a year before you feel like you're friends. It all depends on how you feel when you're around them." Tell Me How It Ends] is written from a transnational perspective, and all the more lucid for it.” —The Intercept I thought this was a terrific book and totally suitable for discussion at a Book Club. Henrietta has recently started a job transcribing the Life Stories of the terminally ill. Despite initially liking the structure of the interviewing procedures, she soon realises not all lives fit the formula. She becomes intrigued by the life story of one client, Annie, whose sister Kath disappeared in December 1974. Knowing that with Annie nearing the end of her life time is short, Henrietta sets about investigating Kath’s disappearance. Although death and dying feature large in the book, it is not gloomy; genuinely more a celebration of life and an unspoken edict to make the most of our time and say what needs saying while we can. That in itself would be a good, life-affirming book, but coupled with an intriguing cold-case complete with plot twists, as well as quirky characters and incidents from the ‘Grief Café’, it makes for an excellent and engaging read. Really accessible and readable but plenty to discuss as well.” As far as the writing style is concerned, it took me a while to get used to it, mainly because I had a hard time following some sentences, but after a few chapters it became very easy and I liked the banter between the various characters and the descriptions of scenes and places. The book was selected with the help of a panel of library staff from across the UK. Our readers loved Tell Me How This Ends – here are some of their comments:Tell Me How This Ends is her debut. Whether writing fiction or interviewing people for articles, she is fascinated by the life stories that we all carry with us. She has two grown-up children and lives with her husband and their wayward dog, Lottie, in Bristol. A word from Jo It’s missing something at the beginning to hook the readers attention. It’s also missing the thing after the hook to keep your attention/make you invested. Planning to buy Tell Me How This Ends for your group? Buy books from Hive or from Bookshop.org and support The Reading Agency and local bookshops at no extra cost to you. Tell Me How It Ends is intimate, heartbreaking, and revealing—and I am convinced the country would be a better place if everyone were required to read it.” —Shondaland In the age of Trump, the call to bring ‘anger and clarity’ to writing refutes the idea that literature is a guilty, escapist indulgence. Tell Me How It Ends insists that artists take action, and its message is clear: we are all deeply implicated in the plight faced by these children.” —Paste

This noble instinct probably feels familiar to the many writers who, since the American political crisis began with the election of Donald J. Trump, have been turning their work outward to looming racial, economic, and environmental injustices. But what Luiselli accomplishes, in her volunteer work and in Tell Me How It Ends, is quite a bit more pointed: a transformation of consciousness.” —Literary Hub

A Note From the Publisher

The plot is Iris, a tarot card reader, who is, I guess we can say, recruited to help save a prisoner. This prisoner is of the Caemi race, unlike Iris who is from the Senti race. Caemi have more magic abilities than the Senti and it was so much fun being able to see how Iris was able to learn more about tarot reading and other magics around her from the Caemi she met on the rescue mission. Content warnings: Family-based trauma, fantasy violence and racism, kidnappings, imprisonment, anxiety Unlike Henrietta, Annie is brimming with confidence—but even she has limits when it comes to opening up. Ever since that terrible night when her sister left a pile of clothes beside the canal and vanished, Annie has been afraid to look too closely into the murky depths of her memories. When her attempts to glide over the past come up against Henrietta’s determination to fill in the gaps, both women find themselves confronting truths they’d thought were buried forever—especially when Henrietta’s digging unearths a surprising emotional connection between them. Tell Me How It Ends is a very short book that looks at migration as a source of hope, as well as a technical, bureaucratic process that eats up people (and children) caught in the trauma of trying to navigate it.” —GQ A damning confrontation between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children seeking a new life in the US.

Deeply researched, personal, and written in distilled, gorgeous prose that demands to be read, Tell Me How it Ends captures the great injustices that come from trying to lump complex lives and circumstances into a single political issue.” — Portland Mercury Lets start to say that I absolutely loved the rep in this. It always brings me so much joy to have a book set in a queernormative world. The main character grew up so sheltered that she didn't really know about queer identities and the way the characters explained theirs to her was done so masterfully.

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Tell Me How It Ends is a slight book with a big impact. . . . It is long-form reporting, as well as a kind of memoir—and finally, in its coda, written after Trump’s election, it becomes a call to action.” —Financial Times Luiselli’s book . . . becomes worthy of inclusion in a great American (and international) canon of writing about migration.” —Texas Observer Sharp and compelling, Tell Me How It Ends demands that [these children] be seen.” —World Literature Today

Zudem hat mir gefallen, dass es sich zwischenzeitlich anfühlte, als würde ich dazu noch einen Krimi lesen, was sicherlich für den Spannungsteil sorgte. ⁣ Luiselli’s awareness of a story’s ability to restrict informs the book’s judicious use of these children’s lives, as well as its quietly brilliant structure as a series of responses to the questionnaire, which Luiselli describes as a reflection of ‘a colder, more cynical and brutal reality.’ . . . The account that emerges has no fixed origin, and the crisis, as Luiselli wisely points out, belongs not to any specific country or countries but to all of us living in this corner of the world.” —New York Times Sunday Book Review This is a vital document for understanding the crisis that immigrants to the U.S. are facing, and a call to action for those who find this situation appalling.” —Publishers Weekly Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book for free in exchange for a review and support promoting the book as part of the author’s street team. This book serves as another wake up call, and, even more importantly, a call to action. . . . It’s another step forward in the strange struggle of our modern age, or maybe it’s any age, the humanizing of humans. The very least we can all do is hear these stories. Read this book.” —Proximity MagazineIn an essay as bracing as it is searing, the incomparable Valeria Luiselli explores the 2014 immigration crisis. Luiselli writes with a clarity that underscores the nightmarish conditions and nonsensical bureaucracy undocumented children face on their passage to America and toward U.S. citizenship. Tell Me How It Ends evokes empathy as it educates. It is a vital contribution to the body of post-Trump work being published in early 2017.” —Katharine Solheim, Unabridged Books At the end of the day, it is a cozy YA fantasy about the importance of exploring who you are and the world around you. The characters... They were amazing. Iris was so much fun and very relatable to me. Her Autism is very similar to mine and I was right there with her any time she was frustrated by not understanding another character. Marin was the most fun to read, they were so charming and joyful, honestly, you cannot be sad when reading him. He won't allow it. He cheers you right up. Luiselli struggles with the linguistic and narrative difficulties of her job as an interpreter. She sometimes tells her daughter what she hears, and her daughter always asks how the stories end, though Luiselli is unable to answer this question. She also considers the fact that what a child says during the interview greatly affects whether or not they’ll be deported. If they answer the questions “correctly,” it’s more likely that a lawyer will agree to take their case. A “correct” answer, Luiselli explains, is one that is candid about the hardships a child has endured, making it clear why they can’t return to their home country.