Beginning Middle End

‘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’THEGLOSSARY

‘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

© 2026 Fourth Estate (Audiobook): 9780008804831

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Audiobook: 28 lipca 2026