Migration Touches Every Life

Author Valeria Luiselli, whose previous works have traced the voices of those displaced by borders, has written a new novel called Beginning Middle End. According to Electric Literature, the story follows a mother and her twelve-year-old daughter traveling to Sicily to retrieve an archaeological relic—a journey that spans four generations of women, each a storyteller in their own way. What distinguishes it: Luiselli has embedded recorded sounds from Sicily into the narrative, accessible via QR codes—volcanic exhalations, underwater currents, winds, and singing fishermen captured on-site and layered throughout the text. The result, Electric Literature reports, is a fragmentary novel that explores how fractured memories can be preserved across time and geography, turning the act of writing itself into an act of restoration. The novel poses a deeper question: what it means to live in the middle when memories fade and borders—both tectonic and human—define the spaces we inhabit.

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