Solito: A Read with Jenna Pick: A Memoir

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New York Times Bestseller • Read With Jenna Book Club Pick as seen on Today • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiography • Winner of the American Library Association Alex Award • A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century

A young poet tells the inspiring story of his migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine in this “gripping memoir” (NPR) of bravery, hope, and finding family.

Finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction • One of the New York Public Library’s Ten Best Books of the Year

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the PEN/Open Book Award

“I read Solito with my heart in my throat and did not burst into tears until the last sentence. What a person, what a writer, what a book.”—Emma Straub

“A riveting tale of perseverance and the lengths humans will go to help each other in times of struggle.”—Dave Eggers

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Vulture, She Reads, Kirkus Reviews

Trip. My parents started using that word about a year ago—“one day, you’ll take a trip to be with us. Like an adventure.”

Javier Zamora’s adventure is a three-thousand-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border. He will leave behind his beloved aunt and grandparents to reunite with a mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. Traveling alone amid a group of strangers and a “coyote” hired to lead them to safety, Javier expects his trip to last two short weeks.

At nine years old, all Javier can imagine is rushing into his parents’ arms, snuggling in bed between them, and living under the same roof again. He cannot foresee the perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, pointed guns, arrests and deceptions that await him; nor can he know that those two weeks will expand into two life-altering months alongside fellow migrants who will come to encircle him like an unexpected family.

A memoir as gripping as it is moving, Solito provides an immediate and intimate account not only of a treacherous and near-impossible journey, but also of the miraculous kindness and love delivered at the most unexpected moments. Solito is Javier Zamora’s story, but it’s also the story of millions of others who had no choice but to leave home.

Review

“A gripping memoir… Solito is special for many reasons, but the main one is Zamora’s voice and the energy of his vivid retelling of his journey . . . And that makes it required reading.”—Gabino Iglesias, NPR

“Zamora . . . recounts in absorbing detail the dangerous, weekslong journey he took from El Salvador to reunite with his parents in the United States when he was just 9.”—The New York Times

“The magic of this book lies not only in the beguiling voice of young Javier, or the harrowing journey and immense bravery of the migrants, or in the built-in hero’s journey of this narrative. It’s hard to reconcile the fact that this book hasn’t always been with us. How can something so essential and fundamental to the American story not already be part of our canon?”—San Francisco Chronicle

“An important, beautiful work.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Zamora’s [Solito] is a distinctly American memoir, and he tells a distinctly American story.”—The Nation

“A monumental accomplishment.”—Oprah Daily

“Crafted with stunning intimacy . . . you’ll feel so close to the boy [Zamora] was then that you’ll think about him long after the book is done. It’s impossible not to feel both immersed in and changed by this extraordinary book.”—Los Angeles Times

“Solito is a stone-cold masterpiece, an absolute masterpiece. I know I used that word twice. That’s how you know I mean it.”—Emma Straub

“A riveting tale of perseverance and the lengths humans will go to help each other in times of struggle. With [Solito], Javier Zamora arrives to the forefront of essential American voices.”—Dave Eggers

“What Javier Zamora has accomplished in Solito feels miraculous. This is a pitch-perfect recapturing of the voice, consciousness, and emotions of [Zamora’s] nine-year-old self.”—Francisco Goldman

“An instant classic. . . Javier Zamora has elevated the ‘child migrant story’ to new literary heights.”—Jose Antonio Vargas

“A new landmark in the literature of migration, and in nonfiction writ large.”—Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River

“In luminous prose . . . with tenderness and searing honesty Zamora writes, for the first time, a Salvadoran account of what it takes to reach the border, cross it on foot, and survive. I cannot recommend this book enough, nor overstate its accomplishment.”—Carolyn Forche

“Solito is a revelation.”—Daniel Alarcón

“[A] beautifully wrought work that renders the migrant experience into a vivid, immediately accessible portrayal.”—Kirkus Review (starred review)

“A stirring portrait of the power of human connection . . . an immensely moving story.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

About the Author

Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador in 1990. His father fled the country when he was one, and his mother when he was about to turn five. Both parents’ migrations were caused by the U.S.-funded Salvadoran Civil War. When he was nine Javier migrated through Guatemala, Mexico, and the Sonoran Desert. His debut poetry collection, Unaccompanied, explores the impact of the war and immigration on his family. Zamora has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and holds fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter one

La Herradura, El Salvador

March 16, 1999

Trip. My parents started using that word about a year ago—“one day, you’ll take a trip to be with us. Like an adventure. Like the one Simba goes on before he comes home.” Around that same time they sent me Aladdin, Jurassic Park, and The Lion King, alongside a Panasonic VHS player for my eighth birthday.

“Trip,” they say now as I’m talking to them at The Baker’s, where Abuelita Neli, Grandpa, and I go to call them—we don’t have a phone at home, but we do have a color TV, a brand-new fridge, and a fish tank.

“¡Javiercito!” Abuelita Neli waves her hand at me. She’s always called me that. I think my nickname, Chepito, reminds her too much of what the town calls Grandpa: Don Chepe.

“Your parents say you’ll soon be with them,” Abuelita says, and smiles, showing off her two top middle teeth lined in gold. Her dimples dig deeper into her round face. Tía Mali, who also has a round face, isn’t here, because she’s working at the clinic. She and Abuelita have been using the word more and more. Trip this, trip that. Trip trip trip. I can feel the trip in the soles of my feet. I see it in my dreams.

In some dreams I’m Superman, or I’m Goku, flying over fields, rivers, over El Salvador, over all the countries, over the people, towns, all the way to California, to my parents. I ring their bell. They open their huge door, tall and wide, made from the brownest wood, and I run to them. They show me their living room. Their huge TV. Their backyard with a swimming pool, a lawn, fruit trees, a mini soccer field, a white fence. I climb their marañón trees, eat their mangos, play in their garden . . .

Every night, between praying and sleeping, I lie in bed and think about them. ¿What type of bed do they sleep on? ¿Is it big? ¿Is it a waterbed like in the movies? ¿Are the sheets soft? I imagine cuddling right in the middle. The comfiest white sheets. Mom to my left, Dad to my right, a mosquito net like a crown covering all of us.

Whenever a plate breaks, whenever I find an eyelash, whenever I see a shooting star, I wish to be in that bed with both of them in La USA, eating orange sherbet ice cream. I never tell anyone—if I tell anyone my wish it won’t come true.

I have bad dreams también. Bad dreams of growing a beard with my parents still not here. Bad dreams where I’m not up there with them—¡and I’m thirty years old! Bad dreams of being chased by pirates, or running down a hill during a mudslide.

“The bad dreams, those you have to tell first thing in the morning so they don’t stay in your mind. And never in the kitchen, or else they get in your stomach. That’s how you get indigestion,” Mom told me, and I never forgot.

Trip. I’ve started using the word at school. I began telling my closest friends: “Fijáte vos, one day I’m taking a trip. Like a real-real game of hide-and-seek.”

In first grade, I was the only one who didn’t have both parents with me. Mali says they left because before I was born there was a war, and then there were no jobs. Now, most of my friends don’t have their dad or mom here either. A few lucky friends have left to be with their parents in La USA. Most left inside giant planes.

At recess, my friends and I talk about eating our first pepperoni pizza like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, eating lasagna like Garfield, eating McDonald’s, watching the new Star Wars inside a theater with air-conditioning, eating “popcorn” with butter. I’ve never tried any of these things except for pizza from Pizza Hut, and that was last Christmas.

“¿But will you miss me? ¿Will you?” my friends ask.

“Puesí,” I say, but I don’t really know.

I ask them if they will miss me. “Absolutely,” they say, because no one who’s left to La USA has ever come back to visit. Sometimes their grandma or grandpa will walk by on the street and we’ll ask them how So-and-So is, and they respond, “So-and-So says hi”—that’s the closest they come to remembering us. “Oh, gracias, doña, gracias, don. Tell them we say hi.” But we never hear from them again.

The Baker is still here. His wife and all six of his kids también. They look happy. I want what The Baker’s family has: everyone in the same room. All my friends and I want to be with our parents, where everything is new, fresh, where garbage is collected by trucks, where water comes out of silver faucets, where it snows the whitest snow, where people have snowball fights and cut real pine trees for Christmas—not spray-paint cotton branches in white like we do here.

It’s because our parents are not here and we’re not there that Mays and Junes are sad. For most of us, our grandparents are the ones who show up for Mother’s and Father’s Day assemblies. It’s not that we don’t love them. We do. I love Abuelita so much. I love her cooking. The way my face gets stuck in her curly, frizzy hair that she dyes black, her short hair that makes her look like a microphone, her hair that smells like pupusas when she hugs me. I love her two dimples when she smiles. Her wide and flat nose with its dark-brown mole in the middle that she has to check at the hospital every year to see it doesn’t get too big. And I love her fake eyebrows she draws thin with a pencil first thing in the morning.

I love my mom, también. I’ve never met my dad—or I have, but I don’t remember him. I was about to turn two when he left. He sounds nice over the phone. His voice is deep and raspy, but it’s still soft, like a sharp stone skipping over water. I always talk to him second, after I talk to Mom. I remember everything about her. Her harsh voice like a wave crashing when she got mad at me. Her breath like freshly cut cucumbers.

Now I talk to her first, and then she hands the phone to Dad. Sometimes I’m so shy with Dad, Mom has to be on the phone at the same time. Other times Tía Mali whispers things I’ve done that week to tell him.

They send pictures every few months, and in the pictures Dad looks kind and strong. I like his thick mustache. His thick black hair. His big teeth. The gold chain he wears over his shirt, his muscles showing. Everyone in town tells me stories about him, but I haven’t really asked him anything because I get shy when I hear his voice.

Now Grandpa is talking to them, trying to whisper something into the phone, trying to make it so I won’t hear. But I do hear. I’ve been listening. My hearing is good. It’s really good. I hear him whisper, “Don Dago,” then something else I can’t make out, then he blurts out, “By Mother’s Day.”

Don Dago is the coyote who took Mom to La USA four years ago. He’s been coming around the house more often. I can put two and two together. I’m my grade’s valedictorian; I get a diploma every year for being the best student.

Mother’s Day. Since kindergarten the nuns have made us embroider handkerchiefs with Feliz Día de la Madre or Feliz Día del Padre in blue or red thread. Every. Single. Year. At least the P’s are easier than M’s. In second grade, my friends and I started writing our grandparents’ names instead. It’s easier.

But this Mother’s Day will be different. ¡This is finally the year I see my parents! This year I will embroider Mom’s name on a handkerchief and deliver it to her—in person.

“He’ll get there before summer. He won’t be cold like you were in the mountains,” Grandpa tries to whisper, like I don’t know they’re talking about me. I hide my happiness, my smile, but it’s hard not to run around The Baker’s living room. Hard not to knock the tables over. Hard not to run the four blocks home. Hard not to run into the clinic where Tía Mali is working. I don’t know if I’ll be able to pretend once she gets off work at six p.m. But I do, I pretend, I walk back at Abuelita’s pace, holding her hand. Clutching it. Squeezing it until both our hands sweat and the sweat says: It’s happening. It’s finally happening.

Reviews:

5.0 out of 5 stars Timely

J.L. · October 4, 2025

Powerful and important. America is built on, by, and for immigrants. Understanding their perspectives and all they’ve gone through to become American is entirely necessary especially in this day and age when our country is being destroyed. Beautiful story. Heartbreaking and full of hope.

5.0 out of 5 stars Heart Wrenching

P. · September 19, 2025

Couldn’t put it down. A very heartfelt account of his journey. Never knew if it would end well. Gripping. Excellent.

4.0 out of 5 stars Compelling story

A.R. · January 27, 2025

Thus was a well written memoir of a child immigrating from El Salvador. The one criticism I have is the large amount of untranslated Spanish language throughout this story. At first I would stop & look up translations. However, as the story progressed, I gave up and just went for contextual comprehension. I believe I missed many story elements as a result.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Truly Beautifully Written Book! 😍❤️

S. · October 10, 2023

Wow! That’s really all I can say about this book! Wow! It’s truly amazing!! I LOVED it & I’m not usually a memoir type person; more of a fiction/romance reader! I read this for my book club & I am SO glad I did; I would have never heard of Mr. Zamora otherwise. ☺️ It is an AMAZING story of courage & of strength! I am truly PROUD of little “Javiercito”; it is a miracle that he made it to the U.S. (or “La USA”, as he called it 😉). I firmly believe that EVERYONE should read (or listen 🎧😉; the author does a VERY good job at reading his own book, as well as writing his own story 😊) to this book (especially the people who think that all immigrants are “criminals” & should not be allowed in the country … 😒) I am also the daughter of immigrants, but my parents were very lucky: they were both able to come on student visas & are able to stay on work permits. I also have a cousin named Carla, as well (the young girl who came with Javier to the U.S.). And to think this is STILL happening; was particularly angry when the child separation policy was put in place in this country because I knew that these children (& their parents) didn’t DESERVE that … 😡 Anyway, I truly HOPE you find Pati, Chino, & Carla (the 3 people who stayed (& PROTECTED him) with “Javiercito” despite it all), Señor Zamora! You definitely deserve it, “hermanito”! 😍❤️ A TRULY beautifully written memoir!! This should be made into a movie; it’s SO good! Truly, it had me in utter tears 😭 (in the BEST way, I assure you 😉) by the end!! 😊😍❤️ (Definitely for older readers, though (even though Javier is 9 years old during the events of the book), due to the amount of cuss words in it, both in Spanish & in English. Or possibly for late high school readers, depending on their reading level & their maturity. 😉)

5.0 out of 5 stars A gifted writer; a difficult subject

M.o.3.B.a.a.L.L. · January 29, 2024

Javier Zamora is a gifted writer. Solito is his memoir, the story of his crossing into the US illegally as an 9-year-old boy traveling among strangers. Zamora's ability to convey to the reader the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, feels, and feelings of his crossing is exceptional. His prose waxes a bit poetic at times, but he is a poet first, and a memoir-writer second, so that is perhaps to be expected. In some ways, his poetic descriptions seem as much a part of him and of his story as the facts, people, and events he conveys. They are what brings an unexpected beauty to an otherwise unconscionable tale.While the writing of his memoir is indeed well done, and for that reason alone this book is deserving of 5 stars, the book itself is a hard one to read. Solito is not fiction. This "story" was in fact lived by a nine-year-old little boy - one who laughs, cries, plays games, worries, and talks about poop way too much (don't all 9 year old boys?) - and that is both disturbing and heartbreaking. No 9 year-old child should experience what Javier experienced, and yet he is not alone. There are many, many children, not just at the Mexican/American border, but around the world, who share these experiences, and worse.At a time when illegal immigration into the United States continues at unprecedented levels, and when states along the border of Mexico are fighting back in unprecedented ways (Arizona & Texas, specifically), this book is bound to leave the American reader feeling conflicted and wondering if there is any way to adequately address not only illegal immigration into this country, but the reasons waves of people are fleeing their homelands, their families, their livelihoods, and risking it all to find a new life in a country that works so hard to keep them out.

Could not put it down

N.T.K.M. · October 14, 2023

Compelling true story of a young El Salvadoran boy who migrated to reunite with his parents in the US. Beautifully written and an important story to be told.

Una historia única y muy emocionante

O.P. · February 18, 2024

Solito es un libro que te roba la atención desde el primer momento hasta el final. No pensé llorar pero he terminado de leer el libro llorando. Como salvadoreño le agradezco a Javier Zamora por compartir su historia, en medio de cada relato hubiera querido ser parte del grupo para poder ayudar a Javiercito y darle un abrazo cuando se sentía solo, en serio es muy emocionante su historia.

Gives an incredible insight into the journey Central American migrants take to try and reach the USA

K. · March 31, 2023

ProsAn incredibly detailed and personal account of the journey Central American migrants take to try and reach the USA.It gave me a better appreciation and understanding of the role and influence that coyotes have on the migrant journey. They can't simply be dismissed as all predatory, exploitative and evil purely trying to profit from the misfortune of others.ConsThe amount of Spanish words included in the text in an English book becomes tedious and annoying after a while. If so much of it is lost in translation from Spanish to English, then why even release an English version?It does seem to be a extraordinary level of detail in Javier's journey recalling the events that happened over 10 - 15 years ago when he was only 9 years old. I didn't quite buy the authors explanation of this at the end of the book

incredible

s.m.g. · July 15, 2025

A friend recommended this book and I shall now do the same to anyone who will listen. This is an incredible story about a small boy travelling from El Salvador to the US, with a small group of strangers. It written so well and you’re with Javier every step of the way. I can’t recommend enough.

I couldn’t put this book down!

K.L.S. · November 23, 2022

I can’t remember reading another book that has affected me like this one! I never realized just how horrible that trip is, nor how determined the people making it are. I’m so glad that I knew it was a memoir, so he had to make it okay.

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Visit the Hogarth Store

Solito: A Read with Jenna Pick: A Memoir

Product ID: U0593498089

Condition: New

4.6

Solito: A Read with Jenna Pick: A Memoir-0

Type: Paperback

^AED95¹¹

Price includes VAT & Import Duties

Availability: In Stock

Quantity:

Order today to get by 7-14 business days

Delivery fee of AED 20. Free for orders above AED 200.

Returns & Warranty policies

Imported From: United States

At BOLO, we work hard to ensure the products you receive are new, genuine, and sourced from reputable suppliers.

Your trust is our top priority, and we are committed to maintaining transparency and integrity in every transaction.

Unless otherwise stated, all prices displayed on the product page include applicable taxes and import duties.

All items are shipped by air, and any products classified as “Dangerous Goods (DG)” under IATA regulations will be removed from the order and cancelled.

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Review

About the Author

Reviews:

5.0 out of 5 stars Timely

J.L. · October 4, 2025

5.0 out of 5 stars Heart Wrenching

P. · September 19, 2025

Couldn’t put it down. A very heartfelt account of his journey. Never knew if it would end well. Gripping. Excellent.

4.0 out of 5 stars Compelling story

A.R. · January 27, 2025

5.0 out of 5 stars A Truly Beautifully Written Book! 😍❤️

S. · October 10, 2023

5.0 out of 5 stars A gifted writer; a difficult subject

M.o.3.B.a.a.L.L. · January 29, 2024

Could not put it down

N.T.K.M. · October 14, 2023

Compelling true story of a young El Salvadoran boy who migrated to reunite with his parents in the US. Beautifully written and an important story to be told.

Una historia única y muy emocionante

O.P. · February 18, 2024

Gives an incredible insight into the journey Central American migrants take to try and reach the USA

K. · March 31, 2023

incredible

s.m.g. · July 15, 2025

I couldn’t put this book down!

K.L.S. · November 23, 2022

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