Beginning Middle End
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jul 28, 2026
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Named a Novel Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026 by the New York Times • One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2026
From the beloved, award-winning author of the culture-changing hits Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How it Ends comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and daughter traveling together after the collapse of a marriage and the dissolution of their traditional family structure.
Valeria Luiselli's novel opens the morning a mother and her teenage daughter arrive in Sicily, during a summer of rapidly-changing winds, volcanic rumbles, and sudden tempests. They’ve landed near the ancient ruins where the narrator’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. How do you begin again, the mother wonders, pondering her family line, and what if the new beginning you're imagining is actually the end?
While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives together—cooking meals side by side, reading out loud to each other, playing chess, bickering and making-up—her deeply intelligent, inquisitive daughter begins to take the reins of the story. She becomes increasingly curious about her great-grandmother’s past as a digger in archaeological sites and ancient tombs, and urges her mother to leave their enclosed day-to-day in search for answers about their family’s past and future.
Beginning Middle End evolves into a road novel of exquisite tenderness. In their drive through Sicily, mother and daughter cross paths with the island's migrants, storekeepers, and elders, but also its volcanoes, its winds and its waters. As their trip progresses, it becomes a journey to origins—not just to the familial past across continents, languages, and generations, but also further back to a mythical and geological past. With her own mother showing signs of dementia, the narrator confronts the primary questions of life: Where is home? Where do we dwell and seek safety? 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.
