Invisible Child

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction 2022.

Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2022.


Based on nearly a decade of reporting, Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. Born at the turn of a new century, Dasani is named for the bottled water that comes to symbolise Brooklyn's gentrification and the shared aspirations of a divided city. As Dasani moves with her family from shelter to shelter, this story traces the passage of Dasani's ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north.

Dasani comes of age as New York City's homeless crisis is exploding. In the shadows of this new Gilded Age, Dasani leads her seven siblings through a thicket of problems: hunger, parental drug addiction, violence, housing instability, segregated schools and the constant monitoring of the child-protection system.

When, at age thirteen, Dasani enrolls at a boarding school in Pennsylvania, her loyalties are tested like never before. Ultimately, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning the family you love?

By turns heartbreaking and revelatory, provocative and inspiring, Invisible Child tells an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family and the cost of inequality.

With compassion and curiosity, [Elliott] uses the story of Dasani to make visible the cycles of poverty, inequity, and resilience that plague families across the United States ... This is a remarkable achievement that speaks to the heart and conscience of a nation. - Publishers Weekly

© Andrea Elliott 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

  • Andrea Elliott’s reporting has an intimate, almost limitless feel to it… The result of this unflinching, tenacious reporting is a rare and powerful work whose stories will live inside you long after you’ve read them.

    New York Times

  • A monumental work of journalism

    Sunday Times

  • This is non-fiction writing at its best – uncluttered, evocative and well-researched… This is not a polemic. Elliott bears witness but does not preach; she shows but rarely tells. She does not pretend to be a neutral bystander (how could you immerse yourself in a struggling family for eight years and not root for them?) but does not intrude on her own storytelling. It is not a morality play either. The villains are too elusive and the heroes too flawed for that. This is structural, generational poverty at work in all its gruesome, demeaning inhumanity and punitive, institutional brutality.

    New Statesmen

  • A gripping and propulsive work of narrative non-fiction . . . [an] indelible, virtuosic portrait of contemporary America

    Financial Times

  • A triumph of in-depth reporting and storytelling … a visceral blow-by-blow depiction of what ‘structural racism’ has meant in the lives of generations of one family … above all else it is a celebration of a little girl-an unforgettable heroine whose frustration, elation, exhaustion, and intelligence will haunt your heart.

    Ariel Levy

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