In Valeria Luiselli’s new novel Beginning Middle End, her narrator—a mother writing a novel that sounds awfully similar to Beginning Middle End—determines with her daughter that there are several things her novel-in-progress is not: it’s not a ghost story, it’s not about time travel, and it certainly isn’t about the mother and daughter themselves. If it’s about any mother-daughter relationship at all, she insists it’s about a different mother and daughter. Luiselli’s narrator is on a book tour that eventually brings her to Sicily, and throughout their travels, she is forced, much like Luiselli, to dodge the accusation that she writes “autofiction”:
“I denied it like I was denying a petty crime, and ventured a confusing explanation about why the fiction I write is not of that sort, and why I really have no interest in it. But then my daughter, who had been reading in silence next to me, looked up from her book, stared the journalist straight in the eye, and reproduced an entire monologue from the character of a girl in my novel, a little girl who in the novel is the daughter of the narrator.”
This slippage between narrators is common throughout Beginning Middle End, and common, frankly, within Luiselli’s growing body of work. As an author best known for her work on migration, the borders of her novels feel increasingly (and productively) permeable. The daughter in Beginning Middle End remembers scenes from Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive as her own memories—even though the mother insists they never happened in real life. Their travels through Europe follow a divorce painfully reminiscent of the family-breakup we witness in the same novel. And as a matter of form, Beginning Middle End organizes itself almost identically to Lost Children Archive, albeit with slightly less ephemera. Even the title echoes Lost Children Archive’s first page, where Luiselli’s unnamed narrator reflects on how eventually she and her husband will need to be able to tell her children a story with “a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
After five previous books of fiction and essays, Beginning Middle End is the first novel I have read by Luiselli that reads as truly familiar—an extension more so than a reinvention of her past work. For this reason, it also feels like it might be Luiselli’s most radical career-turn. The mother in this novel fittingly finds herself preoccupied with repetition and the seeming impossibility of reinvention: she an echo of her mother and her daughter an echo of her. “Maybe home is repetition,” she suggests early on, and Luiselli accordingly writes like an artist completely at-home in their chosen form.
So while Luiselli and the mother are not writing a ghost story (that would better describe Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd) and also are not writing about time travel (or so the mother says), Luiselli has found considerable comfort blending her novel and essay writing into a form that feels entirely her own. Which is not to say that all readers will be on board: If there is a fair critique to be leveled at Luiselli’s latest effort, it would probably concern that while Beginning Middle End frequently invokes and reflects on the logic of plot, its own plot is relatively thin. In the middle part, as mother and daughter embark on a familiarly Luisellian road-trip, the mother almost rhetorically preempts this critique, describing her own literary effort:
“A novel about a mother and her daughter, a daughter and her mother, traveling along the edge of somewhere, toward some other time frame. A novel in the middle, the middle of a novel. Or is it not a novel, but an essay? Perhaps the middle does not fit into the tighter architecture of a novel, the corset of plot. The middle feels more akin to the distracted, loose, meandering spirit of essaying.”
Meander, this book does. Luiselli uses the third space she carves between a novel and an essay to engage with ideas she has returned to throughout her bibliography. She writes elegantly about migration from Europe to Latin America, and in the middle, about refugees to Italy. She writes about a reverence for the Classics, while branding Odysseus “a motherfucker” for trafficking women. The narrator questions her belief in chronological time, and suggests that longing for the present more than the past might constitute a form of time travel. Beginning Middle End is more synthesis than a new thesis. And for what a novel titled Beginning Middle End may ironically lack in robust plot, it makes up for in sheer intellectual adventurousness.
In the book’s penultimate section, we take another familiar formal turn, giving voice to the daughter as she writes a letter to her grandmother—a standout character in her own right, at turns staving off dementia and working with an eco-radical group to disrupt the building of a canal at the U.S-Mexico border. (The mother notes this may well be a conspiracy theory.) Through the young girl’s narration, the novel metamorphosizes in front of the reader’s eye to become about the possibility of reinvention and change: Can these women form a different family soundscape? Can Luiselli reiterate on her previous work? Does time enable us to start anew? And what are we to make of the echoes that resound across borders and time and texts?
Luiselli leaves us with one final echo when the daughter addresses a letter with her mother’s name: not writing the name Valeria Luiselli (as those anticipating autofiction may wish for) but Ella Camposanto—the author of Elegies for Lost Children, a fictional text that appears in Lost Children Archive. It’s a jarring moment, less a grand reveal than a confusing Borgesian gesture buried toward the end. I’ll admit I’m still unsure what to think about this move. Is she signing off with another author’s name? Are we reading work from the same Ella Camposanto we read in Lost Children Archive? If so, how are we to account for the fact that the author of Elegies for Lost Children supposedly lived from 1928 to 2014? How are we to make sense of so much slippage in time and narrative? And how could I, like this mother, not believe in time travel—suddenly forced to return to the beginning and wrestle with this novel once again?
FICTION
Beginning Middle End
By Valeria Luiselli
Knopf
Published July 28, 2026
Some versions introduced larger game boards, colorful graphics, new themes, or even characters from popular movies and video games.