Principio, medio, fin

Principio, medio, fin (Beginning Middle End in English) is Valeria Luiselli's 2026 novel, set seven years after Lost Children Archive. Ella Camposanto, a recently divorced writer, travels to Sicily with her twelve-year-old daughter Manuela, a speed-chess player who loves Latin and Greek literature.

They start in Catania and cross the island, where Ella's maternal grandmother grew up, while Mount Etna erupts nearby. Ella hopes to start over and write again, and she worries about her own mother's failing memory back in Mexico.

The two also argue over what to do with an ancient mosaic tile of the god Proteus that the grandmother took from an archaeological dig as a girl.

Told in fragments that mix memory, myth, poetry, photographs and history, with Ovid and the pre-Socratic philosophers close at hand, the book follows four generations of women and asks what a family hands down. Migration and xenophobia in Europe run through the background, and the daughter narrates the final section. The English edition is published by Knopf in the US and Fourth Estate in the UK, and the novel was a finalist for the 2026 National Book Award for Fiction.