Beginning Middle End is a powerful and page-turning novel— the tale of a mother and a daughter starting over, searching for a new story.
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About Beginning Middle End
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.
This book 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.
Praise for Title
“What sets Valeria Luiselli’s new novel apart is its clarity, its immediacy, its vividness. Not just the characters, but the very rooms, the views from windows and the streets, are created with precision and lucidity. And then there are the feelings and the memories, the desires and the fears—these are etched with an astonishing sense of accuracy.”—Colm Tóibín, author of The News from Dublin
“This book is a profound meditation on parenthood and the nature of change, the essence of story, of accounts and why we account, of what should be accounted for. And at its core is the impossible attempt to return something lost and unknowable—something from the past that sees into the future. I loved it, beginning, middle, and end. It’s a beautiful, maybe perfect, novel.”—Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars
“Inventive, brilliant, playful, and transporting, dazzles on every page. It is a novel about love, self-invention, and lore, both historical and familial. Valeria Luiselli is extravagantly gifted—a writer possessed of both wisdom and an inquisitive, powerful heart.”—Katie Kitamura, author of Audition
“This book is an animal from the future, with five hearts beating at once—daughter, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and reader. Each time one of the hearts beats faster, it touches all the others. An instant classic; Valeria Luiselli at her bravest and most sincere.”—Samanta Schweblin, author of Good and Evil and Other Stories
“Arresting and layered. . . . 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.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
About Valeria Luiselli, Author of Beginning Middle End
Valeria Luiselli is an acclaimed Mexican American 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 Fellowship and the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, an American Book Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize, and the 2021 Dublin Literary Award. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She teaches at Harvard University and Bard College. She lives in New York City.
You can learn more about Valeria Luiselli on wikipedia, and connect with her on LinkedIn and X (though LitStack includes this link to Valeria Luiselli on X, we do not endorse the site nor do we encourage you to spend time on the site).
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Knopf | Penguin Random House
ISBN Hardcover 9798217208319
Pub Date: July 28, 2026
LitStack Spots by Valeria Luiselli
Litstack has spotted these other titles by Valeria Luiselli that you should add to your TBR stack, including Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli, and The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli.
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