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 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

“Arresting and layered. . . . Throughout, Luiselli makes reference to ancient Greek and Roman mythology, which adds depth to her profound portrait of the relationship between mother and daughter as they navigate the new shape of their family and try to understand each other. It’s a masterpiece.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Beginning Middle End

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