Valeria Luiselli — Beginning Middle End

A mother and a teenage daughter driving Sicily after a divorce. The audiobook is the tell. Luiselli reads it across eight hours with Maia Enrigue Luiselli, her own daughter, which turns a decade of accusations about autofiction into a production credit. Four generations of women, a grandmother's archaeological dig, migrants met on the roadside: this is the Lost Children Archive method turned on her own family line instead of somebody else's border. Publishers Weekly starred it. The room is correct here, and it took the room four novels to get correct. Published July 28 by Knopf — 368 pages, $35.