Beginning Middle End
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 28 Jul 2026
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
From the beloved, award-winning author of the modern classics Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and a daughter starting over, searching for a new story.
This story begins when a mother and her daughter take off on a trip. It is a summer of rapidly changing winds, volcanic rumbles, and sudden tempests. They’ve landed in Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the mother’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. The narrator’s marriage has collapsed, her mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is on the threshold of adolescence, starting to ask difficult questions and form complex memories. How do you begin again? the narrator wonders, pondering her family line. How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong?
While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives as a duo—cooking meals side by side, reading out loud to each other, playing chess, bickering and making up—her daughter takes the reins of the story, and their journey soon becomes a quest for origins, not just to the familial past across continents, languages, and generations, but also farther back, to a mythical and even geological past.
Beginning Middle End evolves into a road novel of exquisite tenderness, spanning four generations of women. In their travels through Sicily, mother and daughter cross paths with the island’s migrants, storekeepers, and elders, and also its volcanoes, its winds, and its waters. Weaving myths, ancient philosophy, and natural history with fleeting moments of contemporary life, the unforgettable characters in this novel take us on a journey across time, and confront some of life’s primary questions: How do stories shape our children’s memories and imagination? 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?
Warm, funny, and poetic, this novel is an ode to imagination and possibility in dark times.
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.
