Beginning Middle End: A Novel
Beginning Middle End: A Novel
by Valeria Luiselli
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About the Book
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.
“A beautiful, maybe perfect, novel.” —Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars
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.
Published on Jul 28, 2026
About the Author
Valeria Luiselli is an acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and the international bestseller Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, an American Book Award, the Folio Prize, and the 2021 International Dublin Literary Award. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She lives in New York City.
Editorial Reviews
“Inventive. . . . Luiselli crafts a novel of ideas that challenges the very idea of narrative, yet one that bristles with raw feeling.”—TIME“Luiselli pushes the formal envelope in her most audacious work yet.”—The Boston Globe“Luiselli’s prose is elegant as ever—she handles difficult themes with grace, and the two main characters prove to be unforgettable. It’s quickly becoming apparent that Luiselli is one of the country’s most gifted novelists.”—Los Angeles Times
“A mother and daughter rework their lives against a volcanic backdrop, amid the Sicilians and their ancient history. After the last page, you sit there a while.”—Chicago Tribune
“The gifted young Mexican writer returns this month with her fourth novel, the second she has written in English and her first since Lost Children Archive launched to widespread plaudits more than seven years ago. . . . The history sought by its mother-daughter main characters is not a record of bureaucratic cruelty but something much more intimately personal: the links shaped and tested by generations of shared heritage and experience.” —NPR
“The road novel weaves together four generations of women through archaeology, mythology, and the natural world, using Luiselli’s characteristic ‘documentary fiction’ style of storytelling—for which she was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 2019.”—W Magazine
“Bewitching. . . . A multi-faceted book of portents and possibilities. . . . Much of the novel’s ingenuity and intrigue lies in its subtext and interrogation of themes such as memory, migration and the mechanics of writing. . . . An affecting novel for anyone midway through their life or seeking their own new beginning.”—Financial Times
“Structurally masterful. . . . Mind-expanding and heart-expanding; a summer book for life.”—The Guardian
“This breathtaking novel invokes myth, history, and philosophy to probe life’s big questions about motherhood, memory, and our impermanent place in this world.”—Forbes