Books The dirt on American Dirt
American Dirt
by Jeanine Cummins (Tinder Press)
Reviewer: Donal O’Donoghue
The first big literary beast of 2020 is out and it’s a belter. American Dirt is a thriller you’re not likely to have read, a timely tale that taps into these turbulent times. Lydia runs a bookstore in Acapulco, Mexico. Her husband, Sebastian, is a crusading journalist who writes about the drug cartels. Together with their eight-year-old son, Luca, they live a cosy life. When Lydia befriends a charming book-loving man she doesn’t realise that he is also the boss of the local cartel, Los Jardineros ( These ‘gardeners’ use their spades and axes for non-horticultural purposes). What follows is a shocking event that forces Lydia and Luca to go on the run from their middle-class life, heading towards El Norte and hoping for a new life in the United States. Close behind them are the sicario (assassins) as they travel by bus, car and the infamous El Bestia (the goods train that desperate migrants cling to as they attempt the border). No one can be trusted: police, strangers or even padres.
American Dirt has all the ingredients for a heart thumping, nerveshredding thriller. And boy does it deliver. But its subject and story, told with compassion and intelligence, means it is more than just another thriller that pounds your senses and then, like fast food, is forgotten as soon as you finish. It resonates with relevance and with a human touch: the plight of the migrant, the twist of fate that throws you from happiness into hell, the walls of the US government, the corruption that allows the narcos to thrive and the inherent goodness of a people demonised by some. Cummins cleverly picks Acapulco as Lydia’s home town, a one-time tourist magnet that became the murder capital of Mexico. As Lydia puts it, if Acapulco can fall, nowhere in Mexico is safe from the violence of the cartels. In broad strokes American Dirt recalls both Cormac McCarthys’s Tex-Mex thriller No Country For Old Men as well his postapocalyptic horror, The Road, but it carves its own unique space. If you want to pick up the first un-putdownable novel of 2020, here it is.