Valeria Luiselli's fourth novel, Beginning Middle End, follows a Mexican narrator living in the US who, after a difficult divorce, travels through Europe on a book tour with her 12-year-old daughter before settling in Sicily for the summer. The novel is prompted by the daughter's request for her mother to write a story with a conventional beginning, middle and end, a challenge Luiselli has grappled with before in her non-fiction, and the book becomes as much about the difficulty of shaping narrative as about the events themselves.

Despite eventful ingredients, including an erupting Mount Etna, wildfires, a mother possibly developing dementia and contemplating eco-terrorism, and a valuable Roman mosaic tile with links to the myth of Proteus, the review finds the novel resistant to conventional plot momentum, unfolding instead in fragmented segments. The narrator repeatedly questions whether she is writing a novel or an essay, and the reviewer suggests this self-doubt is only resolved when the daughter takes over the narrative, reflecting Luiselli's longstanding essayistic and self-reflexive style, which dates back to her 2010 debut, Sidewalks.