Oprah Announces New Oprah's Book Club Pick: American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
The latest Oprah's Book Club pick is here: American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins.
American Dirt is the 83rd-ever selection for Oprah's book club, and her third since her partnership with Apple after choosing The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout.
A 2013 study from the New School concluded that “reading literature improves the capacity to identify and understand others’ subjective states.” If that’s true, then Oprah’s just-announced Oprah’s Book Club pick, the novel American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, will deepen readers’ understanding of a migrant’s plight.
The 83rd pick for Oprah's Book Club, and the third in Oprah’s partnership with Apple, introduces us to a mother and son—Lydia, a bookstore owner from Acapulco, and her 8-year-old son Luca—who are forced to flee Mexico after a drug kingpin orders a hit on Lydia’s husband, a journalist covering the rise of a drug cartel. Their odyssey—one that involves life-threatening obstacles as they make their way to the United States border on foot and via freight train—becomes all of ours as we root for them to survive and have the chance to build a new life.
“Like so many of us, I’ve read newspaper articles and watched television news stories and seen movies about the plight of families looking for a better life," Oprah explains of her latest selection. "But this story changed the way I see what it means to be a migrant in a whole new way."
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Jeanine Cummins has written three previous books, the first a memoir documenting the rape and murder of Cummins’s two cousins and the family’s struggle to come to terms with what happened, and two novels. In researching this book, Cummins spoke with many on the front lines—migrants, border patrol, volunteers at the border, and others who are eyewitnesses to this unfolding story.
But it’s Cummins' protagonists—Lydia, Luca, the teenaged sisters Soledad and Rebecca, and others—who enable us to feel that we are with them as they make their way to El Norte, trying to believe that what awaits them there is a future.
American Dirt hits bookstores today. It has been widely hailed as one of the most anticipated books of 2020, including by OprahMag.com, and has already sparked lively debate—which readers will be able to participate in with Oprah over the coming weeks on Instagram at @oprahsbookclub. On March 6, an in-person conversation between Oprah and the author will premiere exclusively on Apple TV+.
American Dirt is the third selection in Oprah's recently-launched Book Club with Apple, a partnership created to connect readers around the world through the books they can access immediately on their devices. Her first Apple pick was Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, and her second was Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout.
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