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You begin again, and again, and the story keeps reshaping itself in your hands.
Praised by Wandering Stars author Tommy Orange as "a beautiful, maybe perfect, novel," from the acclaimed mind behind Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends.
Rent new hardcover on Trove: $13.99 - Each rental copy can be rented for 30 days. If you love the book and decide to keep it, the remaining balance applies.
Buy new hardcover on Trove: $35.00
____________________________________
About the book:
A mother and daughter land in Sicily for a summer of shifting winds and volcanic rumbles, near the ruins where the mother's own grandmother once worked an archaeological dig. The narrator's marriage has just collapsed, and she's left wondering how anyone begins again once they've gotten the beginning wrong.
As the mother tries to piece their life back together—cooking, reading aloud, playing chess, bickering and reconciling—her daughter starts to take over the telling of the story herself. What begins as a trip becomes a quest across four generations of women, reaching back through family history and into something closer to myth.
Along the way, mother and daughter meet the island's migrants, storekeepers, and elders, as well as its volcanoes, winds, and waters. Beginning Middle End blends mythology, natural history, and the textures of contemporary life into a road novel of remarkable tenderness.
Warm, funny, and quietly profound, this is a story about how memory gets made, how it disappears, and how imagination lets us go on telling it anyway.
You'll love this book if:
You're drawn to mother-daughter stories that are tender without being sentimental.
You want a novel that doubles as a meditation on memory, myth, and the natural world.
You loved Lost Children Archive and have been waiting for Luiselli's next page-turner.
You appreciate literary fiction with real momentum—a road novel you can't put down.
You're moved by books that close with a visual element, like the archival photo epilogue here.
Pre-release readers are calling it elegant, unforgettable, and expansive:
Early readers describe Beginning Middle End as elegant. One bookseller called it filled with sentences "you want to cut out and paste to your wall," with a structure unlike anything else they'd read.
Another reader found it unforgettable, saying they were lost in the book and in its characters as they found their way both together and apart.
A third called it phenomenal, a meditation where nature, history, mythology, and memory collide in a story that's neither fully fact nor fully fiction.
A fourth described it as expansive yet intimate, smart, and a genuine joy to discover.
About the author:
Valeria Luiselli is the acclaimed author of the international bestseller Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, along with the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth and the essay collection Sidewalks. She is a MacArthur Fellow and has won two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, an American Book Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize, and the 2021 Dublin Literary Award, with her work translated into more than thirty languages. She teaches at Harvard University and Bard College and lives in New York City.
Publisher: Knopf
Title: Beginning Middle End: A Novel
Author: Valeria Luiselli
On Sale Date: July 28, 2026
ISBN 13: 9798217208319
ISBN 10: 9798217208319
Format: Hardcover
Retail Price: $35.00 USD
BISAC: Fiction / Literary
Page Count: 368 pages
Dimensions: 9.5 in H | 6.4 in W | 1.2 in T
Weight: 1.2 lb
You begin again, and again, and the story keeps reshaping itself in your hands.
Praised by Wandering Stars author Tommy Orange as "a beautiful, maybe perfect, novel," from the acclaimed mind behind Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends.
Rent new hardcover on Trove: $13.99 - Each rental copy can be rented for 30 days. If you love the book and decide to keep it, the remaining balance applies.
Buy new hardcover on Trove: $35.00
____________________________________
About the book:
A mother and daughter land in Sicily for a summer of shifting winds and volcanic rumbles, near the ruins where the mother's own grandmother once worked an archaeological dig. The narrator's marriage has just collapsed, and she's left wondering how anyone begins again once they've gotten the beginning wrong.
As the mother tries to piece their life back together—cooking, reading aloud, playing chess, bickering and reconciling—her daughter starts to take over the telling of the story herself. What begins as a trip becomes a quest across four generations of women, reaching back through family history and into something closer to myth.
Along the way, mother and daughter meet the island's migrants, storekeepers, and elders, as well as its volcanoes, winds, and waters. Beginning Middle End blends mythology, natural history, and the textures of contemporary life into a road novel of remarkable tenderness.
Warm, funny, and quietly profound, this is a story about how memory gets made, how it disappears, and how imagination lets us go on telling it anyway.
You'll love this book if:
You're drawn to mother-daughter stories that are tender without being sentimental.
You want a novel that doubles as a meditation on memory, myth, and the natural world.
You loved Lost Children Archive and have been waiting for Luiselli's next page-turner.
You appreciate literary fiction with real momentum—a road novel you can't put down.
You're moved by books that close with a visual element, like the archival photo epilogue here.
Pre-release readers are calling it elegant, unforgettable, and expansive:
Early readers describe Beginning Middle End as elegant. One bookseller called it filled with sentences "you want to cut out and paste to your wall," with a structure unlike anything else they'd read.
Another reader found it unforgettable, saying they were lost in the book and in its characters as they found their way both together and apart.
A third called it phenomenal, a meditation where nature, history, mythology, and memory collide in a story that's neither fully fact nor fully fiction.
A fourth described it as expansive yet intimate, smart, and a genuine joy to discover.
About the author:
Valeria Luiselli is the acclaimed author of the international bestseller Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, along with the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth and the essay collection Sidewalks. She is a MacArthur Fellow and has won two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, an American Book Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize, and the 2021 Dublin Literary Award, with her work translated into more than thirty languages. She teaches at Harvard University and Bard College and lives in New York City.
Publisher: Knopf
Title: Beginning Middle End: A Novel
Author: Valeria Luiselli
On Sale Date: July 28, 2026
ISBN 13: 9798217208319
ISBN 10: 9798217208319
Format: Hardcover
Retail Price: $35.00 USD
BISAC: Fiction / Literary
Page Count: 368 pages
Dimensions: 9.5 in H | 6.4 in W | 1.2 in T
Weight: 1.2 lb
