‘Mind-expanding and heart-expanding; A summer book for life’ ALI SMITH

‘Dazzles on every page’ KATIE KITAMURA

‘An astonishing book’ DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA

‘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, love 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.

A hottest book of the summer as seen in New York Times, Guardian, Elle, AnOther, New Yorker, Glossary, Town & Country, NPR and more.

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

‘Bewitching … an affecting novel for anyone … seeking their own new beginning’ FINANCIAL TIMES

‘A beautiful, maybe perfect novel’ TOMMY ORANGE, author of Wandering Stars

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

‘Among the best books to read on holiday … beautiful and lyrically perfect’ THE GLOSSARY

‘Luiselli is one of the country's most gifted novelists’ LOS ANGELES TIMES

‘Rich, lyrical and moving’ ANOTHER

‘A new literary form altogether’ MONOCLE

‘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

Details

ISBN13: 9780008804817
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 368
Edition:
Publication Date: 28 Jul 2026
Publisher: Scholastic US
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 21.6(H)x13.5(L)x2.8(W)360
Weight (gm): 360

Author Biography

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983. She is the author of the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth, which won the 2016 LA Times Book Prize for Fiction; the essay collection Sidewalks; and Tell Me How It Ends, an essay about the situation faced by children arriving at the US-Mexico border without papers. Lost Children Archive is her first novel written in English.

Reviews

‘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’ Colm Tóibín, author of The News from Dublin
‘Valeria Luiselli is among the writers I most admire … A lightning bolt of a book, every page blazes electric’ Doireann Ní Ghríofa, author of Said the Dead
‘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
‘Bewitching … an affecting novel for anyone midway through their life or seeking their own new beginning’ Financial Times
‘A mother and daughter’s odyssey … charts the narrator’s efforts to corral life into a narrative’ Guardian, Book of the Day
‘Luiselli’s writing is rich, lyrical and moving … [an] abundant story’ AnOther
‘Among the best books to read on holiday … her most personal and formally exhilarating work yet’ The Glossary
‘Original, enjoyable and thoughtful, a mesmerising take on the current climate catastrophe and its parallels in classical literature’ TLS
‘A new literary form altogether, where storytelling itself becomes an act of survival and reinvention’ Monocle
‘Luiselli’s prose is elegant as ever … and the two main characters prove to be unforgettable’ Los Angeles Times
‘An emotional look into intergenerational remembrance’ BOMB Magazine
‘Beautiful, funny and tender … made me think of Sebald and Deborah Levy … I loved it’ Emma Healey, author of Elizabeth is Missing
‘A profound meditation on parenthood and the nature of change’ Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars
‘An instant classic … Luiselli is at her bravest and most sincere’ Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream