Beginning Middle End: A Novel
Valeria Luiselli
Jul 2026 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Valeria Luiselli, Maia Enrigue Luiselli, and Marta López Astrain
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7 hr 37 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • From the beloved, award-winning author of the culture-changing hits Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and daughter traveling together after the collapse of a marriage and the dissolution of their traditional family structure.
Valeria Luiselli's novel opens the morning a mother and her teenage daughter arrive in Sicily, during a summer of rapidly-changing winds, volcanic rumbles, and sudden tempests. They’ve landed near the ancient ruins where the narrator’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. How do you begin again, the mother wonders, pondering her family line, and what if the new beginning you're imagining is actually the end?
While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives together—cooking meals side by side, reading out loud to each other, playing chess, bickering and making-up—her deeply intelligent, inquisitive daughter begins to take the reins of the story. She becomes increasingly curious about her great-grandmother’s past as a digger in archaeological sites and ancient tombs, and urges her mother to leave their enclosed day-to-day in search for answers about their family’s past and future.
Beginning Middle End evolves into a road novel of exquisite tenderness. In their drive through Sicily, mother and daughter cross paths with the island's migrants, storekeepers, and elders, but also its volcanoes, its winds and its waters. As their trip progresses, it becomes a journey to origins—not just to the familial past across continents, languages, and generations, but also further back to a mythical and geological past. With her own mother showing signs of dementia, the narrator confronts the primary questions of life: Where is home? Where do we dwell and seek safety? How are a family’s memories made and what happens when they disappear?
Warm, funny, and poetic, this novel is an ode to imagination and possibility in dark times.
* This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF featuring visual elements from the book.
Valeria Luiselli's novel opens the morning a mother and her teenage daughter arrive in Sicily, during a summer of rapidly-changing winds, volcanic rumbles, and sudden tempests. They’ve landed near the ancient ruins where the narrator’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. How do you begin again, the mother wonders, pondering her family line, and what if the new beginning you're imagining is actually the end?
While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives together—cooking meals side by side, reading out loud to each other, playing chess, bickering and making-up—her deeply intelligent, inquisitive daughter begins to take the reins of the story. She becomes increasingly curious about her great-grandmother’s past as a digger in archaeological sites and ancient tombs, and urges her mother to leave their enclosed day-to-day in search for answers about their family’s past and future.
Beginning Middle End evolves into a road novel of exquisite tenderness. In their drive through Sicily, mother and daughter cross paths with the island's migrants, storekeepers, and elders, but also its volcanoes, its winds and its waters. As their trip progresses, it becomes a journey to origins—not just to the familial past across continents, languages, and generations, but also further back to a mythical and geological past. With her own mother showing signs of dementia, the narrator confronts the primary questions of life: Where is home? Where do we dwell and seek safety? How are a family’s memories made and what happens when they disappear?
Warm, funny, and poetic, this novel is an ode to imagination and possibility in dark times.
* This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF featuring visual elements from the book.
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • From the beloved, award-winning author of the culture-changing hits Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and daughter traveling together after the collapse of a marriage and th...
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About the author
VALERIA LUISELLI is an acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and the international bestseller Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, an American Book Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize, and the 2021 Dublin Literary Award. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She teaches at Harvard University and Bard College. She lives in New York City.
VALERIA LUISELLI is an acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and the international bestseller Lost Children...
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