Valeria Luiselli’s Sicilian Odyssey Reviewed by the Guardian

The Guardian this week reviews Valeria Luiselli’s new novel “Beginning Middle End,” which follows a mother and daughter’s journey from the United States to Sicily. The critic describes the book as tackling urgent themes of migration and family, though becoming increasingly inward-looking as it progresses.

Luiselli, whose previous works include “Lost Children Archive” and “Tell Me How It Ends,” sets the Sicilian leg of the odyssey as a personal reckoning for the characters. According to the Guardian, the novel draws on Grace Paley’s short story “A Conversation With My Father,” anchoring itself in a tradition of intergenerational storytelling.

The choice of Sicily — a Mediterranean crossroads of migration and tourism — gives the novel a charged setting. The Guardian notes that the island becomes both a destination of heritage and a site of contemporary displacement, reflecting Luiselli’s broader concerns with borders and belonging.