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.

Reviews

Praise for Lost Children Archive:

‘An engrossing portrait of a family … involving and richly textured’ Sunday Times

‘A mold-breaking new classic … the novel truly becomes novel again in her hands – electric, elastic, alluring, new’ New York Times

‘Urgent, poignant … Dazzlingly, compellingly [Luiselli] urges her readers towards a common humanity’ Financial Times

‘A resonant Great American Novel for our time – a dense and layered novel of the Americas, evocative of Kerouac and Bolaño, Rebecca Solnit and Juan Rulfo’ Vanity Fair

‘Engrossing … a beautiful, loving portrait of children and of the task of looking after them' New Yorker

‘Daring, wholly original, brilliant … a twist on the great American road trip novel … Luiselli is an extraordinary writer’ NPR

‘[Lost Children Archive] demands a single sitting … an object lesson in why fiction matters’ TLS

‘A gorgeous and vital ghost-rich soundscape, and one of the most brilliant portrayals of child-parent relationships I have ever read’ Max Porter, author of Shy

‘Luiselli is a master. Not since Lolita has a road trip so brilliantly captured the dark underbelly of the American dream’ Carmen Maria Machado, author of In The Dream House

‘Valeria Luiselli writes with so much intelligence and compassion and originality, her work always astonishes me. Lost Children Archive is absolutely phenomenal’ Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Checkout 19

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.