HarperCollins

Beginning Middle End - Valeria Luiselli

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

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