Beginning Middle End - Valeria Luiselli

`A summer book for life' ALI SMITH `Dazzles on every page' KATIE KITAMURA `I was utterly captivated' KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE 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. `What sets Valeria Luiselli's new novel apart is its clarity, its immediacy, its vividness' COLM TOIBIN, author of Long Island `Beautiful, funny and tender . I loved it' EMMA HEALY, author of Sweat `An instant classic, Luiselli is at her bravest and most sincere' SAMANTA SCHWEBLIN, author of Fever Dream `I loved spending time with the women in Beginning Middle End, who soon began to feel like friends' OCTAVIA BRIGHT, author of This Ragged Grace `Luminous, reverberating and original - a novel to reckon with and to marvel at' PAUL FARLEY, author of When It Rained for a Million Years