1. How does BEGINNING MIDDLE END explore the way that children make sense of the world and its stories and what the world’s future will look like?

2. And how does BEGINNING MIDDLE END reflect on what we (the children’s parents or adults more generally) do tell them about that same world? What things are we perhaps wrong about, and what things might we make right?

3. What is it like to be a parent in a world that seems to be collapsing, a world where the future seems so fragile, perhaps even uninhabitable?

4. Is this a book about time travel? How so?

5. How are both foreshadowing and hindsight used in the novel?

6. How does this novel explore the notions of beginnings, middles and endings? What were some of the reflections about these three notions that you felt most touched a fiber of your own experience?

7. Throughout BEGINNING MIDDLE END, the intuition emerges that life may not be clearly divided into beginning, middle and end, but rather that we always live in a changing “middle.” This “middle” is also the moment when the complexity of time becomes most visible: Our children begin their own journeys while our parents age. How do you interpret this “middle” the novel speaks of ? Is it a moment of crisis, awareness or transformation? What does it mean for you to inhabit this intermediate point in life?

8. The narrator constantly reflects on the act of writing: how to find a beginning, how to shape experience, how to write about fear or loss. How does writing appear in the novel: as an attempt to order experience, as a form of resistance against fear, or as a search for meaning amid uncertainty?

9. BEGINNING MIDDLE END repeatedly returns to the origin and meaning of certain words, almost as if understanding the birth of language also helps us understand the human experience. Why do you think the novel insists on this search for the origin of words? Can language help us look at the world in a more attentive or conscious way?

10. BEGINNING MIDDLE END draws on classical mythology and ancient ways of imagining the cosmos at various points. These tales from the past seem to engage with the characters’ contemporary questions about time, change and the meaning of life. Why do you think the novel returns to myths? What can these ancient stories offer us today for understanding our own experience of the world?