Beginning Middle End - by Valeria Luiselli (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD - 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.

Review Quotes

"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

"Inventive, brilliant, playful, and transporting, Beginning Middle End 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

"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 and Brooklyn

"This book is a profound meditation on parenthood and the nature of change, the essence of story, of accounts and why we account, 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

"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

"A rare, aching work of deep thought and pure feeling. I was utterly captivated, entranced, and moved by it." --Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of Almost Life

"A beautiful, funny, and tender study of mothers, daughters, time, and landscape. . . . I will be thinking about it for a long time." --Emma Healey, author of Elizabeth Is Missing

"A moving ode to our short time in the world and the connections that make our lives worth living. Luiselli is truly a bard for our modern times." --Chicago Review of Books

"Beginning Middle End is a radical release from prescribed chronology and an emotional look into intergenerational remembrance. It's a novel that, with a tender hand, leads the reader through a journey's frustrations and joys before finally arriving at a renewed sense of an ending." --BOMB Magazine, "Editor's Choice"

"Beginning Middle End sustains a vital idea: storytellers who sustain and create collaborative knowledge defend themselves from and sometimes vanquish the violence and danger that necessitate flight." --World Literature Today

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 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.