Her brother was beaten and forced off the bridge but survived and she wrote about the murders in her memoir A Rip in Heaven. When Cummins was 16, two of her cousins were raped and thrown off a bridge in Missouri. Cummins was also drawn to the stories of migrants triumphing over inconceivable hardship, particularly as her family had experienced its own tragedy. Cummins’ grandmother went to the US from Puerto Rico in the 1940s as the bride of a naval officer but never felt at home and resented the misconceptions people had about what it meant to be Latino.

But she says she sensed a swelling undercurrent of racism and prejudice towards migrants from the south, and felt a sense of allegiance towards them as a Spanish-speaker. President Trump was far from the White House and “Build a Wall” was not yet a common refrain when Cummins started American Dirt in 2013. I certainly am a person who woudn’t like to think of myself as doing that,” Cummins, speaking from New York before her international book tour. I am a person who believes in and acknowledges the fact that voices coming out of marginalised communities have been silenced for a very long time and that those voices and those stories have been robbed and hijacked for a very long time. Cummins had long been interested in the migrant crisis unfolding on the United States’ southern border, but felt unqualified to put readers on the perilous path of border-crossers. The stories writers should tell – and their moral responsibilities when writing across sexual, class and racial difference – have increasingly become the subject of public sparring and political division. Cummins, who was born in Spain, where her father was a naval officer, identifies as Puerto Rican and lives in New York, says she was hugely reluctant to adopt the narrative point of view of migrants making the treacherous journey across the Mexico-US border in her new novel American Dirt. The novelist spent a fair amount of time running away from her own story. Jeanine Cummins’ characters were not alone in seeking a way out.

“This,” Lydia reflects, “is how it happens.”

Safety is in El Norte they are now migrantes. Bookstore owner Lydia and her eight-year-old son Luca are the only survivors. Toda mi familia esta muerta por mi culpa: my whole family is dead because of me. The cartel’s calling card is left alongside 16 bodies. A birthday party becomes a backyard massacre.

Jeanine cummings