Beginning Middle End

From the award-winning author of Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli, comes a wondrous, tender and expansive new novel about family, memory and time.

A sonic archive that accompanies the novel here: https://bmesound.com/

A mother and a daughter take off on a road trip after the collapse of a marriage. Their journey begins in Sicily during a summer of rapidly-changing winds, volcanic rumbles and sudden tempests. How do you begin again, the mother wonders, if you got the beginning wrong? The trip soon becomes a quest for origins – not just to the familial past across continents, languages and generations, but also further back to a mythical and even geological past.

With her daughter coming into her own and her mother showing signs of dementia, the narrator finds herself confronting the primary questions of life: How do stories shape our children’s imaginations? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? How are a family’s memories made and what happens when they disappear?

A road novel, a mother-daughter story, a mystery, Beginning Middle End is a shapeshifting novel that offers an exhilarating testament to the power and instability of the stories we hold most dear.

Praise for Beginning Middle End:

“Inventive, brilliant, playful, and transporting, Beginning Middle End dazzles on every page. It is a novel about love, self-invention, and lore, both historical and familial. Valeria Luiselli is extravagantly gifted—a writer possessed of both wisdom and an inquisitive, powerful heart.” 
—Katie Kitamura, author of Audition

“This book is an animal from the future, with five hearts beating at once—daughter, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and reader. Each time one of the hearts beats faster, it touches all the others. An instant classic; Valeria Luiselli at her bravest and most sincere.” 
—Samanta Schweblin, author of Good and Evil and Other Stories

“What sets Valeria Luiselli’s new novel apart is its clarity, its immediacy, its vividness. Not just the characters, but the very rooms, the views from windows and the streets, are created with precision and lucidity. And then there are the feelings and the memories, the desires and the fears—these are etched with an astonishing sense of accuracy.” 
—Colm Tóibín, author of The News from Dublin and Brooklyn

“This book is a profound meditation on parenthood and the nature of change, the essence of story, of accounts and why we account, what should be accounted for. And at its core is the impossible attempt to return something lost and unknowable—something from the past that sees into the future. I loved it, beginning middle and end. It’s a beautiful, maybe perfect novel.”
—Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars

"In Beginning Middle End, Valeria Luiselli’s constellation of storytelling, memory, and myth forms a narrative ark, a mosaic of moon-drawn tides, a windrose of desire paths. It is luminous, reverberating, and original – a novel to reckon with and to marvel at"
—Paul Farley, author of When It Rained for a Million Years

"A rare, aching work of deep thought and pure feeling. I was utterly captivated, entranced and moved by it"
—Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of Almost Life

"A beautiful, funny and tender study of mothers, daughters, time and landscape. It made me think of Sebald and Deborah Levy, but of course Valeria Luiselli has a voice all her own. I loved it and will be thinking about it for a long time"
—Emma Healey, author of Elizabeth is Missing

"Valeria Luiselli is among the writers I most admire, and her Beginning Middle End is even better than I’d dared to hope. A lightening bolt of a book, every page blazes electric"
—Doireann Ni Ghriofa, author of Said the Dead

‘I’ve just read the brand new novel, out in July, by Valeria Luiselli: Beginning Middle End. It’s the ostensibly random – by which I mean its randomness is structurally masterful – story of a mother and daughter, clever and sassy both, on the road, meandering through the heating-up landscapes of Italy, family, history, geology, myth and legacy, accompanied by nothing more than ancient classicism and a set of very contemporary tensions. Mind-expanding and heart-expanding; a summer book for life’
—Ali Smith, the Guardian (What to Read this Summer feature)

“Bewitching. . . . A multi-faceted book of portents and possibilities. . . . Much of the novel’s ingenuity and intrigue lies in its subtext and interrogation of themes such as memory, migration and the mechanics of writing. . . . An affecting novel for anyone midway through their life or seeking their own new beginning.”
—Financial Times

‘In the aftermath of divorce, a mother takes her daughter on a trip to Sicily, where the female lineage of their family tree has roots. Both an escape and a familial excavation, the summer spent under Mount Etna becomes confronting for the narrator as she reckons with her memories, stories passed down through the generations, her sense of self and the hopes she has for her daughter.

Luiselli’s writing is rich, lyrical and moving, whether describing chopping tomatoes or meditating on the passing of time, presented in sections with titles that speak to celestial, geological and biological phenomena and echo the story. At the end there’s an appendix of sorts – postcards and polaroids that are as unexpected as they are pleasing – and add yet another layer to an already abundant story.’
—AnOther, Ten New Books to Add to Your Summer Reading List

‘A beautiful and lyrically perfect novel’
—The Glossary, the Best New Books of 2026, the fiction you need to read

“A mother, her daughter and the mythical landscape of Sicily over a summer. This 2026 book is the story of a woman looking for a new beginning after a divorce, while at the same time trying to start a new novel and looking after a 12-year-old girl. Merging memoir, road narrative and reflections upon female lineage, Valeria Luiselli’s latest work feels less like a novel than a new literary form altogether, where storytelling itself becomes an act of survival and reinvention.”
—Monocle, the Ten Best Books to Take on Holiday Summer 2026

“Beginning, Middle, End is a brilliant book. It features spectacular insights and showcases a writer on the hunt—one who isn’t content with comfortable repetition but who takes risks with new forms in order to tell timeless stories’
—El Mundo

“This feminist novel establishes an intergenerational and intertextual dialogue in which the connection between the great-grandmother and the little girl shines through. Language acts as a lubricant between each link in the chain of women. (…) Beginning, Middle, End reflects the tectonic shifts of writing and life, of fiction, memories, myths, beliefs, and superstitions. Luiselli has written an intelligent novel full of tectonic plates.’
—La Vanguardia

“This novel asks where we are when we are far from the beginning and far from the end, far from one shore and far from the other: in the middle of the river. A moving, luminous, and true book.”
—El Mundo (La Lectura)

“The reader holds in their hands a very ancient book about the power of myth, of the arcane, of ancestors, and of magic. About how to narrate the end of the linear experience of time, (…) returning to childhood to understand ‘the relationship between fiction and memory.’ What the narrator wants is “to write a reversed catastrophe: to begin with the end of the world and end with its beginning; from the loss of memory to the first image of the world imprinted on a large, round, black eye.”
—El Periódico (April)

“Displacement does not function merely as a luminous setting for reconstruction, but rather as an excavation. Amid the summer, beneath Mount Etna, amid the conversation between mother and daughter, familiar ruins begin to emerge—inherited stories, dubious objects, the voices of women passing on memory as one might pass a lamp during a blackout. Luiselli has turned digression into a form of thought. (…) Beginning, Middle, End does not seek a grand concluding statement, despite its three-part title. Rather, it is wary of that narrative convenience that promises to organize life into three clear movements. Here, the beginning is tainted by what happened before; the middle is a storm; the end, a hypothesis.”
—El Periódico

“This novel is destined to be the most important of the decade.”
—Diario de Tarragona

“An exploration of a physical and intimate geography that gives rise, I have no doubt, to one of the great books of this year.” 
—Diario de Pontevedra

“A work of fiction that captivates us, amazes us, and conveys tenderness in every paragraph and every line, through the constant dialogue and rambling of a mother and daughter who gradually begin to get to know each other better, to build trust, and to regain their strength after the storm or Medusa’s attacks.” 
—La Verdad

“Prose that embraces and warms, poetic and powerful. It will surely become a modern classic that fills hearts and offers answers to all those who always travel with curiosity by their side.” 
—Segre

“A warm and sparkling novel in which the characters end up delving into the past in search of answers and glimpse a possible future that connects granddaughters and grandmothers, myths and stones, writing and memory.”
—Agenda Urbana

'An unparalleled novel.' 
— ★★★★★, NRC

'An enchanting novel about what it means to be at home.' 
—De Standaard

'A helping hand for learning to read life differently. Sublime.' 
—Het Parool

'Beginning Middle End is a masterful answer to that persistent question of fact and fiction, and an impressive act of creation. (...) With this book, Luiselli creates her own origin myth. From the very first, classical sentence, it is a magnificent homecoming; a true odyssey.' 
—De Groene Amsterdammer

'In Beginning Middle End, Valeria Luiselli transforms familial upheaval into moving literature.' 
—★★★★, HUMO Book of the Week

 'A philosophical, poetic, and suspenseful novel. (...) Rarely have I read such striking and moving portrayals of the intimacy between parent and child, and of what it means to be ‘at home’.' 
—Trouw 

'Confronting. But also beautiful.' 
—Aaf Brandt Corstius, de Volkskrant 

'Beginning Middle End is Luiselli’s most intimate book to date, and she is at the height of her powers.' 
—Ruth Joos, VRT NWS

'I immensely enjoyed this beautiful story. A must-read for this summer.' 
—Ciao Tutti 

'One of Luiselli’s most memorable works.' 
—★★★★, Cutting Edge

 'Luiselli keeps you glued to the page with reflections that can range from the preparation of a swordfish head to the merging of memory and imagination.'
—VPRO Gids 

'The best book I’ve read in a long time. Inspiring. Excellent. Brilliant.' 
—Elke Geurts, writer

'Moving, intelligent, a book filled with tenderness and wisdom.' 
—Philip Huff, writer

“Everything comes full circle in Valeria Luiselli’s novels. The Mexican writer, beloved for her powerful Archive of Lost Children, is the great storyteller of borders.” 
—La Repubblica

“Valeria Luiselli’s books reveal a unique, unyielding openness to life.” 
—Il Manifesto

“Her best book yet.” 
—*La Lettura* (Corriere della Sera)

“Beginning Middle End is written in a refined, poetic, yet thoroughly contemporary style.”
—Vanity Fair

“With Beginning Middle End Luiselli reaffirms her ability to make us reflect on our human nature as creators of stories and meaning, and on existence as the inevitable condition of ‘being in the middle.’”
—Il Libraio