Beginning Middle End

A mother and her daughter arrive in Sicily for a summer of shifting winds, volcanic rumbles and sudden storms. They have come to the area near the ancient ruins where the mother's grandmother once worked on an archaeological dig. The narrator's marriage has ended, her own mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is approaching adolescence, asking harder questions and forming memories of her own. The narrator keeps circling one worry: how do you begin again when you got the beginning wrong?

The two try to build a life as a pair. They cook side by side, read aloud to each other, play chess, quarrel and make up. Gradually the daughter takes over the telling, and the trip turns into a search for origins. It reaches into the family's past across continents, languages and generations, and further back still, into a mythical and even geological past.

The result is a road novel that spans four generations of women. Along the way, mother and daughter meet Sicily's migrants, shopkeepers and elders, and also its volcanoes, winds and waters. Myth, ancient philosophy and natural history are woven together with passing moments of present-day life. The book asks how stories shape a child's memory and imagination, how we can root ourselves in the world while accepting that we are only passing through, and what becomes of a family's memories when they vanish.

Valeria Luiselli's novel is warm, funny and poetic, and it was longlisted for the National Book Award. It is a tender story about imagination and possibility in dark times.