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From the beloved, award-winning author of the culture-changing hits Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and daughter traveling together after the collapse of a marriage and the dissolution of their traditional family structure.
Valeria Luiselli's novel opens the morning a mother and her teenage daughter arrive in Sicily, during a summer of rapidly-changing winds, volcanic rumbles, and sudden tempests. They've landed near the ancient ruins where the narrator's grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. How do you begin again, the mother wonders, pondering her family line, and what if the new beginning you're imagining is actually the end?
While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives together—cooking meals side by side, reading out loud to each other, playing chess, bickering and making-up—her deeply intelligent, inquisitive daughter begins to take the reins of the story. She becomes increasingly curious about her great-grandmother's past as a digger in archaeological sites and ancient tombs, and urges her mother to leave their enclosed day-to-day in search for answers about their family's past and future.
Beginning Middle End evolves into a road novel of exquisite tenderness. In their drive through Sicily, mother and daughter cross paths with the island's migrants, storekeepers, and elders, but also its volcanoes, its winds and its waters. As their trip progresses, it becomes a journey to origins—not just to the familial past across continents, languages, and generations, but also further back to a mythical and geological past. With her own mother showing signs of dementia, the narrator confronts the primary questions of life: Where is home? Where do we dwell and seek safety? 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.
"Luiselli, a Mexican American writer who's focused on borderlands immigration in previous fiction and nonfiction, has made displacement her great theme...An offbeat migration story as piercing and artful as any in Luiselli's oeuvre." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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)
"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, 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
This information about Beginning Middle End was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Diego Berruecos/Gatopardo
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. 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. She is the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and an American Book Award, and has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She...
Name Pronunciation
Valeria Luiselli: vuh-LAIR-ee-uh loo-SELL-ee
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