Name: The Beginning Place
ISBN: 9780765346254

The Beginning Place

Fleeing from the monotony of his life, Hugh Rogers finds his way to "the beginning place"—a gateway to Tembreabrezi, an idyllic, unchanging world of eternal twilight. Irena Pannis was thirteen when she first found the beginning place. Now, seven years later, she has grown to know and love the gentle inhabitants of Tembreabrezi, or Mountaintown, and she sees Hugh as a trespasser. But then a monstrous shadow threatens to destroy Mountaintown, and Hugh and Irena join forces to seek it out. Along the way, they begin to fall in love. Are they on their way to a new beginning...or a fateful end? source

What Hacker News says

ilamontFeb 2026

I grew up reading Earthsea but later discovered Threshold/The Beginning Place. Some of her short stories are very good, too.

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minncaMay 2021

I think The Beginning Place is an underrated Le Guin book that didn't make the list! It's definitely not science fiction or even futuristic – more like fantasy plus magical realism – but I found the plot so unique and engaging.

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ilamontMay 2021

I have a bit of a different take on Le Guin's best work.

I couldn't get into The Dispossessed. I will try again, though.

I read The Wizard of Earthsea when I was a teen and loved it, struggled with the second book (Tombs of Atuan) at the time, then returned to it 30 years later and now consider it a truly fine work as a story and an examination of religion, tradition, and belief.

Immediately after completing Atuan, moved on to the third book in the series (and liked it) but couldn't get into #4.

I've also enjoyed her short stories, including some of her later collections from the 1990s and 2000s.

A book that is seldom on her "best of" lists but I think should be there IMHO: The Beginning Place. I first read it in the U.K. (with an alternate title, Threshold) but returned to it recently and it holds up in terms of the story and the scope of the strange world it describes. Not to mention the beauty of science fiction or literature or prose or whatever you want to call it in the hands of a master:

The creek, his companion and his guide: what of it? It must join a river, or become a river, downstream, and large or small it must run at last into the sea. His breath caught. He stared blankly at his fire, his mind held by that thought: the sea that lay beyond the coasts of evening. The darkness to which this living water ran. White breakers in the last of dusk and out beyond them the depths, the night. The night, and all the stars.

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