New York City writer Valeria Luiselli will speak about her new book, “The Lost Children Archive,” on Friday, March 1 at Point Reyes Books. The work is “the most honest take I’ve read” on issues of immigration, family separation and the border crisis, said bookstore owner Stephen Sparks, who said his shop is just one of two stops Ms. Luiselli will make on a Northern California tour. The book has received praise for the innovative way it handles its themes with humor, depth and a human touch; defying categorization, it is both a critique of the media’s approach to immigration, a magical-realism novella of Ms. Luiselli’s own making and a compelling narrative of a family slowly coming undone. The narrator we meet in the opening pages—an immigrant married to an immigrant—grows interested in the plight of undocumented children after trying to help a mother at her daughter’s school who desperately needs an immigration lawyer: her two young daughters, who managed to cross the border from Mexico, have been detained. While the narrator seeks to document the stories of children lost at the border, her husband decides to document stories of the Apache. In a sense, both embark on projects focused on those who are lost on American soil. As her husband tells their children stories about the forced removal of native people, the narrator thinks, “The more I listen to the stories he tells about this country’s past, the more it seems like he’s talking about the present.” The couple’s marriage is also starting to unravel, and during a family road trip from New York City to the Southwest, the narrator—and the reader—are forced to sit with thorny questions about the erasure of a people, what it means to document an issue, and who is deserving of a childhood. Everyone in the book is travelling, whether toward or away from one another, on a road or across a desert, to a place charted or unknown. Mr. Sparks believes the book will be of particular interest to readers in West Marin who like to keep abreast of worlds both political and artistic. “Out here, people are very invested in issues, and it’s one thing to say this is a great novel, but it’s more a novel about issues without feeling necessarily like just a political work,” he said. “It retains that playfulness. There’s a sense of humor and indignation that I think fuel a narrative like that; it seems like it’s in the service of a novel and not a political stance—politics is just sort of woven throughout.” Mr. Sparks added that the last time Ms. Luiselli visited the area, she said she “needed to come back.” And while brilliant writers don’t always make for brilliant speakers, Ms. Luiselli commands a room, he said. The event, which starts at 7 p.m., is free.