Valeria Luiselli

‘A summer book for life’ ALI SMITH‘Dazzles on every page’ KATIE KITAMURA‘I was utterly captivated’ KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVEFrom 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 live? 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 disappea? 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 TÓIBÍN, 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

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.

Egy négytagú család elindul New Yorkból dél felé, keresztül az Egyesült Államokon. A férj anyagot akar gyűjteni az apacsokról szóló kutatásához, a feleség pedig a mexikói-amerikai határon illegálisan átkelő gyerekek sorsát és történetét szeretné dokumentálni. Az egyedül vagy embercsempészeknek kiszolgáltatva érkező gyerekek legtöbbje sosem jut át a sivatagon, és sosem találkozik a már korábban az Államokba szökött rokonaival. Miközben a család motelről motelre járva beautózza Virginiát, Tennesseet, Oklahomát és Texast, a szülők egyre többet veszekednek. A feszültség a férfi tízéves fia és a nő ötéves lánya számára is nyilvánvalóvá válik. Bár a szülők mindent megtesznek, hogy szórakoztassák a gyerekeket a hosszú út során, nem tudják kizárni a külvilágot, és amikor a rádióban a migrációs válságról esik szó, a gyerekek kérdezősködni kezdenek - kérdéseik pedig nem várt következményekkel járnak. Luiselli első magyarul megjelenő könyve virtuóz módon mutatja be egy család széthullását, a dél-amerikai bevándorlók és az amerikai őslakosok iránti teljes társadalmi közönyt, és felteszi a kérdést: szabad-e művészetet csinálni mások szenvedéseiből? Mindeközben a történetben nemcsak Geronimo, hanem David Bowie is fontos szerepet kap. Folio-díj 2020, 2019 egyik legjobb könyve (New York Times, Guardian, NPR, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, New York Public Library)

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2019 The moving, powerful and urgent English-language debut from one of the brightest young stars in world literature Suppose you and Pa were gone, and we were lost. What would happen then? A family in New York packs the car and sets out on a road trip. A mother, a father, a boy and a girl, they head south west, to the Apacheria, the regions of the US which used to be Mexico. They drive for hours through desert and mountains. They stop at diners when they're hungry and sleep in motels when it gets dark. The little girl tells surreal knock knock jokes and makes them all laugh. The little boy educates them all and corrects them when they're wrong. The mother and the father are barely speaking to each other. Meanwhile, thousands of children are journeying north, travelling to the US border from Central America and Mexico. A grandmother or aunt has packed a backpack for them, putting in a bible, one toy, some clean underwear. They have been met by a coyote: a man who speaks to them roughly and frightens them. They cross a river on rubber tubing and walk for days, saving whatever food and water they can. Then they climb to the top of a train and travel precariously in the open container on top. Not all of them will make it to the border. In a breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive intertwines these two journeys to create a masterful novel full of echoes and reflections - a moving, powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.