‘A summer book for life’ ALI SMITH
‘Dazzles on every page’ KATIE KITAMURA
‘I was utterly captivated’ KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE
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.
Review :
‘Mind-expanding and heart-expanding; a summer book for life’ Ali Smith, author of Gliff
‘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’ Colm Tóibín, author of The News from Dublin
‘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
‘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
‘Beautiful, funny and tender … made me think of Sebald and Deborah Levy … I loved it and will be thinking about it for a long time’ Emma Healey, author of Elizabeth is Missing
‘This book does something rare: it takes feelings seriously without being sentimental, respects the metaphysical while keeping its feet on the ground. 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
‘A profound meditation on parenthood and the nature of change … 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, reader. Each time one of the hearts beats faster, it touches all the others. An instant classic, Valeria Luiselli is at her bravest and most sincere’ Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream
‘Luminous, reverberating, and original – a novel to reckon with and to marvel at’ Paul Farley, author of When It Rained for a Million Years
‘Arresting and layered … a masterpiece’ Publisher's Weekly
