Where Reasons End

'Profoundly moving. An astonishing book, a true work of art' Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers 
 
From the critically acclaimed author of The Vagrants, a devastating and utterly original novel on grief and motherhood 
 
'Days: the easiest possession. The days he had refused would come, one at a time. They would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into an ally or an enemy to myself.' 
 
A woman's teenage son takes his own life. It is incomprehensible. The woman is a writer, and so she attempts to comprehend her grief in the space she knows best: on the page, as an imagined conversation with the child she has lost. He is as sharp and funny and serious in death as he was in life itself, and he will speak back to her, unable to offer explanation or solace, but not yet, not quite, gone. 
 
Where Reasons End is an extraordinary portrait of parenthood, in all its painful contradictions of joy, humour and sorrow, and of what it is to lose a child. 
 
'A masterpiece. This book haunts me more than any other novel I've read in recent years' Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You 
 
'Heart-wrenching, fearless, and unlike anything you've ever read' Esquire 
 
'I sit here shaken and, I think, changed by this work' Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers 
 
'A devastating read, but also a tender one, filled with love, complexity, and a desire for understanding' Nylon 
 
'The most intelligent, insightful, heart-wrenching book of our time' Sean Andrew Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less 
 
'Captures the affections and complexity of parenthood in a way that has never been portrayed before' The Millions 
 
'Ethereal and electric, radiating unthinkable pain and profound love' Buzzfeed

a disquieting, delicate, affecting book

One of the most moving books I've ever read.

Profoundly moving. An astonishing book, a true work of art.

Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers

Li writes with a shimmering and deeply felt precision.

Unsentimental, brave and beautiful. An absolutely monumental book.

The most intelligent, insightful, heart-wrenching book of our time.

A masterpiece. This book haunts me more than any other novel I've read in recent years.

A highly unusual novel in which a writer confronts one of life's deepest sorrows in losing her child. . . Funny, touching and profoundly moving

Yiyun Li is the author of three novels, Where Reasons End, The Vagrants and Kinder Than Solitude, and two short-story collections, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, as well as the memoir, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She has won literary awards including the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was listed among Granta's 21 Best of Young American Novelists 2007. Her stories have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review and elsewhere. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of a Windham-Campbell Prize and a Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University.

'Days: the easiest possession. The days he had refused would come, one at a time. They would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into an ally or an enemy to myself.' 
 
A woman's teenage son takes his own life. It is incomprehensible. The woman is a writer, and so she attempts to comprehend her grief in the space she knows best: on the page, as an imagined conversation with the child she has lost. He is as sharp and funny and serious in death as he was in life, and he will speak back to her, unable to offer explanation or solace, but not yet, not quite, gone. 
 
Taking the form of a dialogue between mother and son, Where Reasons End is an extraordinary portrait of parenthood, in all its painful contradictions of joy, humour and sorrow, and of what it is to lose a child.

Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life

'Profoundly engaging in depth, with remarkable subtlety and rare, limpid beauty. A must-read' - Mary Gaitskill 
 
A luminous memoir about reading, writing and how to find meaning in a life 
 
Written over two years while the author battled depression, Dear Friend is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living. Interweaving personal memoir with a wide-ranging celebration of writers and books, this is a journey of recovery through literature. 
 
From William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield to Kierkegaard and Larkin, Yiyun Li traces the themes of time and transformation, presence and absence. Drawing on personal experiences from her difficult childhood in China, she constructs a beautiful, interior exploration of selfhood and what is required to choose life.

Reveals, gloriously, the companionship, intimacy, and insight that can come from obsession with the written word

Literature, the clash of public and private, human nature itself-these subjects and more are explored with remarkable subtlety and rare, limpid mental beauty. A must-read for anyone trying to stay sane in a world that might be perceived as insane

Weaving sharp literary criticism with a perceptive narrative about her life as an immigrant in America

An intimate memoir of darkest despair... A potent journey of depression that effectively testifies to unbearable pain and the consolation of literature

Quietly forceful, unrelenting... She unfolds an argument with the self, suspicious of the very concept , but not, ultimately, refuse its possibilities

Novelistic scenes, limpid prose, subtly moving emotion... Personal reminiscences [and] literary meditations... Li explores ruptures in time, the difficulty of writing autobiographical fiction, the pleasures of melodrama

Publisher's description. A luminous memoir from the award-winning author of The Vagrants and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Startlingly original and shining with quiet wisdom, this is the record of a life lived with books and a richly affirming examination of what makes any life worth living.

Beautiful and profound... This book is a terribly beautiful gift to the reader

A remarkable account of literary life [from] an important and gifted writer... Her new book is a meditation on the fact that literature itself lives and gives life

Extraordinary. A storyteller of the first order

Exceptional... one of our major novelists

Yiyun has the talent, the vision and the respect for life's insoluble mysteries... [she] is the real deal

A work of arresting revelations...A writer of meticulous reasoning, probing sensitivity, candor, and poise, Li parses mental states with psychological and philosophical precision in a beautifully measured and structured style born of both her scientific and literary backgrounds.

Li celebrates the authors who make reading a joyous pursuit, and the details that've made her own life worth living.

'What a long way it is from one life to another. Yet why write if not for that distance?' 
 
Written over two years while the author battled depression, in and out of hospital, Dear Friend is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living. Interweaving personal memoir with a wide-ranging celebration of writers and books, this is a journey of recovery through literature. 
 
From William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield to Kierkegaard and Larkin, Yiyun Li traces the themes that have preoccupied these writers and herself: time and transformation, presence and absence, the impulse to abandon life and the impulse to carry on. Drawing on personal experiences - her unstable mother, her time in the Chinese army - she constructs a beautiful, interior exploration of selfhood and what is required to choose life.

Yiyun Li

This brilliant novel examines lives lived, losses accumulated, and the slipperiness of perception. Yiyun Li writes deeply, drolly, and with elegance about history, even as it's happening. She is one of my favorite writers, and Must I Go is an extraordinary book.

There is no writer like Yiyun Li, no one in contemporary literature who is as masterful at digging into the uncertainty of our existence on this earth. And Must I Go is sheer brilliance. Lilia Liska is one of the most arresting, strangely funny, and complex characters I've ever met . . . Li does something truly transformative. She remakes our world for us, so we can figure out how to keep living in it.

A masterpiece. This book haunts me more than any other novel I've read in recent years

Any new book by Yiyun Li is cause for celebration, but now more than ever do we need the clarity and humaneness of her vision. Must I Go takes us into her familiar and powerful emotional territory, brilliantly exploring how what we love, what we lose, and what we mourn make, unmake, and remake us into the human beings that we are.

A portrait of resilience like no other, Must I Go takes Yiyun Li-and the reader-into entirely new emotional territory. Bracing and almost unnervingly perceptive, this is wisdom literature for our time.

Lilia Liska is eighty-one. She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children and seen the birth of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to a strange little book published by a vanity press: the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair. 
 
Drawn into an obsession over this fragment of intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own, rather different version of events. Gradually she undercuts Roland's charming but arrogant voice with her sharply incisive and deeply moving commentary. She reveals to us the surprising, long-held secrets of her own life. And she returns inexorably to her daughter, Lucy, who took her own life at the age of twenty-seven. 
 
How does the past shape the future? How do we live in the face of the unanswerable? Must I Go considers these questions underlying an extraordinary life, exploring both the painfully finite nature of human life and the infinite depths of human beings.

Yiyun Li

Praise for Must I Go

This brilliant novel examines lives lived, losses accumulated, and the slipperiness of perception. Yiyun Li writes deeply, drolly, and with elegance about history, even as it's happening. She is one of my favorite w ...

There is no writer like Yiyun Li, no one in contemporary literature who is as masterful at digging into the uncertainty of our existence on this earth. And Must I Go is sheer brilliance. Lilia L ...

A masterpiece. This book haunts me more than any other novel I've read in recent years

This brilliant novel examines lives lived, losses accumulated, and the slipperiness of perception. Yiyun Li writes deeply, drolly, and with elegance about history, even as it's happening. She is one of my favorite w ...

There is no writer like Yiyun Li, no one in contemporary literature who is as masterful at digging into the uncertainty of our existence on this earth. And Must I Go is sheer brilliance. Lilia L ...

A masterpiece. This book haunts me more than any other novel I've read in recent years

This brilliant novel examines lives lived, losses accumulated, and the slipperiness of perception. Yiyun Li writes deeply, drolly, and with elegance about history, even as it's happening. She is one of my favorite w ...

There is no writer like Yiyun Li, no one in contemporary literature who is as masterful at digging into the uncertainty of our existence on this earth. And Must I Go is sheer brilliance. Lilia L ...

A masterpiece. This book haunts me more than any other novel I've read in recent years

Books by Yiyun Li

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