Beginning Middle End

A NEW YORK TIMES MOST ANTICIPATED NOVEL OF 2026.

‘An instant classic, Valeria Luiselli is at her bravest and most sincere’ SAMANTA SCHWEBLIN

From the award-winning author of Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli, comes a wondrous, tender and expansive new novel about family, memory and time.

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 to the familial past across continents, languages and generations, but also further back to a mythical and even geological past.

With her daughter coming into her own and her mother showing signs of dementia, the narrator finds herself confronting the primary questions of life: How do stories shape our children’s imaginations? 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 mystery, Beginning Middle End is a shapeshifting novel that offers an exhilarating testament to the power and instability of the stories we hold most dear.