BEGINNING MIDDLE END
VALERIA LUISELLI
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now
On the 2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Fiction.
Rating: 5* of five
The Publisher Says: 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.
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.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong?
As a mission statement you don't get a lot clearer than that one, the simple reflection on how hard it is to create a story afresh. The women in this story are unnamed, because naming is a deterministic act, a story's half over when you're named because identity isn't fluid after that. A label like mother or daughter is subject to refinement...whose mother? daughter of whom?...but a name stops the question, collapses the possibility in the narrative by making in the identity "mother" or "daughter" concrete to that one person.
Sicily's ancient land is littered with bits and fragments of many identities that seemed immovable in other times. Ruins of homes, temples, fields, volcanoes, none in their original condition and most only tentatively identified and that with modern superimposed names that we use in place of older names from other stories that built, were built from, other identities. What better place to tell the story of telling the story of building anew identities that were never anything except conditional.
Volcanic violent emotions are everywhere in this story of re/invention. The women are scraped raw and still bleeding without bandages or protection for their wounds as the mother's book tour takes them to this ancient place of ancestral memory for them both. With them is a piece of Classical foreknowledge...a head of Proteus...that belongs in this restless shaky earth because he came from here. And how fitting: coming home in the hands of people reduced to relationship, deprived of the story they shared by loss, amputation, severing of a former castmate; here Proteus and continue a fragment of the story this fragment of a created piece of an idea of his physical form, this godly figment of millions of minds back on eruptive, earthquakey home soil (not even the sea he was an assistant god of in those fevered imaginings). It is the story of this story in a hand-holdable bit of broken-off antique knick-knack.
Mother and daughter move through this not-really native ancestral world, mother doing the mother thing by wondering if her daughter is really going to be the woman she sees coming into focus. Is the Proteus a stolen fragment of patrimony, or a piece of the homeland carted to a frightening new world by a feisty, scared girl shifted by her needs into a simulacrum of male freedom? Does this mean there is a hard-edged channel for the fast-flooding rage of the world in her daughter, or is the idea of belonging uniquely to a time and a place moving her feelings into Earthly action on Proteus' behalf?
Stories have no beginning middle end. We impose those ideas on the world. Time...that thing we are slaves to, are shackled on the side of being dragged along always trying not to be crushed under the wheels of the misunderstood, mischaracterized "juggernaut"...has no inherent direction, the equations don't define beginning middle end. It isn't the gods, then, that created time. That was us.
So here are two women out of place and out of their time, defining new beginnings middles ends with Author Luiselli sweeping the temple steps for their ascent. It is masterful work. It deserves to define your time as beginning middle end.
