Beginning Middle End
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
‘Mind-expanding and heart-expanding; A summer book for life’ ALI SMITH
‘Dazzles on every page’ KATIE KITAMURA
‘Bewitching’ FINANCIAL TIMES
‘Mesmerising’ TLS
From the award-winning author of Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli, comes a wondrous new novel about family, love and starting over.
All I had to do, or so I thought, was to answer a simple question: How do I reinvent it, the story, our lives?
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 through their family history, but also further back to a mythical and even geological past.
With her daughter leaving childhood behind and her mother beginning to show signs of dementia, the narrator finds herself at a crossroads. She must now ask herself: 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 radical portrait of starting over, in all its forms, Beginning Middle End offers an exhilarating testament to the power of the stories and the loves we hold most dear.
A hottest book of the summer as seen in New York Times, Guardian, Vogue, Elle, AnOther, New Yorker, Glossary, Town & Country and more.
‘What sets Valeria Luiselli’s new novel apart is its clarity, its immediacy, its vividness’ COLM TÓIBÍN, author of Long Island
‘An affecting novel for anyone … seeking their own new beginning’ FINANCIAL TIMES
‘A beautiful, maybe perfect novel’ TOMMY ORANGE, author of Wandering Stars
‘Astonishing … a lightning bolt of a book’ DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA, author of Said the Dead
‘Beautiful, funny and tender … I loved it’ EMMA HEALY, author of Sweat
‘Among the best books to read on holiday … beautiful’ THE GLOSSARY
‘The kind of novel you wish would never come to an end’ SPECTATOR
‘One of the country's most gifted novelists’ LA TIMES
‘Rich, lyrical and moving’ ANOTHER
What readers are saying ★ ★ ★ ★ ★:
‘Just about as perfect as fiction comes’
‘Intoxicating … the perfect summer read for someone looking for a book to get lost in’
‘Absolutely magnificent’
‘Literary fiction at its finest’
About the author
Valeria Luiselli is an acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction. Her work is published in more than thirty languages. Her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive, was an international commercial and critical success. It won the Rathbone Folio Prize 2020, the Dublin Award 2021 and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, among others. In 2019 she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant. She lives in New York, and teaches at Bard College and Harvard University.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A writer and her 12-year-old daughter grapple with their family legacy while on a road trip through Sicily in this arresting and layered novel from Luiselli (Lost Children Archive). After a "slow, entangled divorce," the unnamed narrator takes her precocious 12-year-old daughter, also unnamed, on her European book tour. They stop in Catania, near the birthplace of the narrator's grandmother, who, while working as a day laborer on an archeological dig disguised as a man, pocketed a tile with the head of the Greek shape-shifting sea god Proteus. This artifact has been passed down among the women of the family and now resides with the narrator and her daughter. It might be a good luck charm—or a curse. The child, who thinks of the tile as stolen, insists on returning it to the Villa Casale. Mother and daughter debate the issue, prompting the narrator to wonder what kind of person her daughter is ("I'm not sure if my daughter's indignation is a sign of good moral character or a mark of moral rigidity"). 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.
