Beginning Middle End

Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction 2026 LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2026 ‘Mind-expanding and heart-expanding; A summer book for life’ ALI SMITH ‘An instant classic’ SERVICE95 ‘A stunning shape-shifting marvel’ MAX PORTER From the award-winning author of Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli, comes a wondrous new novel about family, love and starting over. All I had to do, or so I thought, was to answer a simple question: How do I reinvent it, the story, our lives? 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 through their family history, but also further back to a mythical and even geological past. With her daughter leaving childhood behind and her mother beginning to show signs of dementia, the narrator finds herself at a crossroads. She must now ask herself: 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 radical portrait of starting over, in all its forms, Beginning Middle End offers an exhilarating testament to the power of the stories and the loves we hold most dear. A hottest book of the summer as seen in New York Times, Guardian, Vogue, Elle, AnOther, New Yorker, Glossary, Town & Country and more. ‘What sets Valeria Luiselli’s new novel apart is its clarity, its immediacy, its vividness’ COLM TÓIBÍN, author of Long Island ‘An affecting novel for anyone … seeking their own new beginning’ FINANCIAL TIMES ‘A beautiful, maybe perfect novel’ TOMMY ORANGE, author of Wandering Stars ‘Dazzles on every page’ KATIE KITAMURA, author of Audition ‘Astonishing … a lightning bolt of a book’ DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA, author of Said the Dead ‘Beautiful, funny and tender … I loved it’ EMMA HEALY, author of Sweat ‘Among the best books to read on holiday … beautiful’ THE GLOSSARY ‘The kind of novel you wish would never come to an end’ SPECTATOR ‘One of the country´s most gifted novelists’ LA TIMES ‘Rich, lyrical and moving’ ANOTHER What readers are saying ★ ★ ★ ★ ★: ‘Just about as perfect as fiction comes’ ‘Intoxicating … the perfect summer read for someone looking for a book to get lost in’ ‘Absolutely magnificent’ ‘Literary fiction at its finest’