Beginning Middle End

‘Dazzles on every page’ KATIE KITAMURA

‘I was utterly captivated’ KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE

‘A beautiful, maybe perfect, novel’ TOMMY ORANGE

From the award-winning author of Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli, comes a wondrous new novel about family, time 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.

‘What sets Valeria Luiselli’s new novel apart is its clarity, its immediacy, its vividness’ COLM TÓIBÍN, author of Long Island

‘Beautiful, funny and tender … I loved it’ EMMA HEALY, author of Sweat

‘An instant classic, Luiselli is at her bravest and most sincere’ SAMANTA SCHWEBLIN, author of Fever Dream

‘I loved spending time with the women in Beginning Middle End, who soon began to feel like friends’ OCTAVIA BRIGHT, author of This Ragged Grace

‘Luminous, reverberating and original – a novel to reckon with and to marvel at’ PAUL FARLEY, author of When It Rained for a Million Years

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.