01/08/2026
It's the first of the month, and you'll be pinching yourself (oh no...) when you read our immersive and gorgeous of August Book of the Month 'Beginning Middle End' by Valeria Luiselli. If you like books that send thoughts crackling through your brain in all directions, that push the form of the novel and the intermingling of reality and imagination - this beauty will delight you. It's about a mother and young daughter who travel from America to Sicily post difficult divorce. There they discover and interrogate classic literature, myth, family history and migration - while the mother tries to write her novel, and worries about her own aging mother back home. The erruption of Mt Etna and insuing wildfires then send the two fleeing accross the island tothe small villiage of their ancestors. The title is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fragmented, multimedia form of Luiselli's previous work, and trying to write a more conventional story with 'a beginning, a middle, and an end'. But it's also references the daughter-mother-grandmother relationship that is at the centre of the story, as well as ideas of transformation, and how people change their own stories and attempt to invent new lives. This may not be that conventional novel, but it's a glorious one. And yes, robbed of a place on the Booker Prize Longlist!
