Beginning Middle End

<strong>'Inventive, brilliant, playful ... dazzles on every page' </strong>KATIE KITAMURA

<strong>'An instant classic, Valeria Luiselli is at her bravest and most sincere'</strong> SAMANTA SCHWEBLIN

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

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. <em>How do you begin again,</em> the mother wonders, <em>if you got the beginning wrong</em>? 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, <em>Beginning Middle End</em> is a shapeshifting novel that offers an exhilarating testament to the power and instability of the stories we hold most dear.