"Luiselli's haunting debut novel . . . erodes the concrete borders of everyday life with a beautiful, melancholy contemplation of dissappearance. [T]his elegant novel speaks to the transience of reality. The elusive strands of the young woman and Owen's narratives intertwine and blur together as Luiselli plays with the idea of time and identity with grace and intuition."-Publishers Weekly, Boxed Review

"[A] lovely and mysterious first novel...the multilayered bok she has devised brings freshness and excitement to such complex inquiries".-Wall Street Journal

"Throughout Faces in the CrowdSidewalks are a wonderful contribution to the long tradition by which authors re-imagine their cities as dream-like spaces created for them to wander around, daydream and discover."-Los Angeles Times

"A masterwork of fractured identities and shifting realities, Faces in the Crowd is a lyric meditation on love, mortality, ghosts, and the desire to transform our human wreckage into art, to be saved by creation. Valeria Luiselli is a stunning and singular voice. Her work burns with an urgency that demands our attention. Read her. Right now."-Laura Van Den Berg, The Isle of Youth

"If every word, for her, has the shadow of two others behind it, and if every city in which she lives carries the ghostly afterimage of all the other cities she has known-as well as the voices of the writers she has researched upon her arrival-then her books become all the more enthralling for the multiplicity they champion . . . the great beauty of her art is seeing all her contrasting stories collapse or blend or combine into an unexpected whole."-Los Angeles Review of Books

"Valeria Luiselli draws readers assuredly into a meditation on time, place and identity as if she were expertly kneading dough."-Kathe Connair, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Valeria Luiselli's Faces in the Crowd is like nothing I've read in a while . . . its musings on obsession and ambition are haunting, and its sense of place is fantastic."-Electric Literature

"Today, she's one of the hottest authors around. Her first work, Faces in the Crowd, and its companion essay collection, Sidewalks, are both hits with critics."-Ozy

"A mother in Mexico City starts writing a novel, and then the novel sort of becomes her life. (Pair with strong coffee.)"-Bustle

"Luisselli delivers a telling image of modern time."-Literature and Arts of the Americas

"Faces in the Crowd is a scaffolding that bounds the empty spaces into which the writer and the reader of the novel can insert their imagination . . . It is empty attention, if not the amazement, of the read and the writer."-Electric Literature

"Valeria Luiselli's swirling, layered novel, Faces in the Crowd, shares this 'tell what it was like' quality."-Missouri Review

"Well-crafted, playful even as it touches on the very serious....[Faces in the Crowd is] an impressively substantial work, in every sense."-Complete Review

"Faces in the Crowd is one of those rare books that manages to