Yiyun Li – författare

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR MEMOIR 2026 LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2025 ‘The best book I have read this year’ DAVID NICHOLLS‘Masterly … I'm in awe’ SALMAN RUSHDIE‘Beautiful’ DOUGLAS STUART‘Extraordinary’ SARAH MOSS‘A formidable testament to a mother’s love’ SARA COLLINS‘There is no good way to say this,’ Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.‘There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.’There is no good way to say this – because words fall short. In this remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance, Li turns to thinking and searching for words that might hold a place for her son, James. Li does ‘the things that work’: including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit. Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction 2026 Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Awards 2025 Finalist for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction 2025 ‘To state that this courageous book is a testament to love is an understatement. One is left altered by it’ Observer ‘Unlike any other book I've read … an unforgettable monument to endurance’ Sunday Times ‘A book that has not a single spare word in it … I loved it so much’ Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake ‘A meditation on living and radical acceptance’ Guardian ‘A memoir unlike others, strange and profound and fiercely determined not to look away’ New York Times ‘One of the most astounding memoirs I have ever read’ Pandora Sykes, author of How Do We Know We're Doing It Right? ‘I will return to it for the rest of my life’ Charlotte Wood, author of Stone Yard Devotional‘A manifesto of living, not dying’ Sinéad Gleeson, The Week

'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

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2025 ‘The best book I have read this year’ DAVID NICHOLLS‘Beautiful’ DOUGLAS STUART‘Extraordinary’ SARAH MOSS‘A formidable testament to a mother’s love’ SARA COLLINS‘There is no good way to say this,’ Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.‘There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.’There is no good way to say this – because words fall short. In this remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance, Li turns to thinking and searching for words that might hold a place for her son, James. Li does ‘the things that work’: including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit. Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction 2026 Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Awards 2025 Finalist for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction 2025 ‘To state that this courageous book is a testament to love is an understatement. One is left altered by it’ Observer ‘Unlike any other book I've read … an unforgettable monument to endurance’ Sunday Times ‘A book that has not a single spare word in it … I loved it so much’ Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake ‘A meditation on living and radical acceptance’ Guardian ‘A memoir unlike others, strange and profound and fiercely determined not to look away’ New York Times ‘One of the most astounding memoirs I have ever read’ Pandora Sykes, author of How Do We Know We're Doing It Right? ‘I will return to it for the rest of my life’ Charlotte Wood, author of Stone Yard Devotional‘A manifesto of living, not dying’ Sinéad Gleeson, The Week

'A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout – I loved it' Charlotte Mendelson‘One of our finest living authors … propulsively entertaining’ New York Times‘Wonderfully strange and alive’ Jon McGregor A propulsive, seductive new novel about friendship, exploitation and intimacy from the prize-winning author of Where Reasons End Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised – the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now, Agnès is free to tell her story.As children in a backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves – until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.A dark, ravishing tale winding from the rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school, to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnès can live without her past. The Book of Goose is a story of intimacy and obsession, friendship and rivalry perfect for fans of Elena Ferrante, Ottessa Moshfegh and Kamila Shamsie. ‘Beguiling … A shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation’ Daily Mail ‘Brilliant … A novel of deceptions and cruelty’ Spectator ‘For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry…resonant with echoes of… My Brilliant Friend, as well Elizabeth Strout… electrifying’ Observer

'Profoundly engaging in depth, with remarkable subtlety and rare, limpid beauty. A must-read' - Mary GaitskillA luminous memoir about reading, writing and how to find meaning in a lifeWritten 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.

Richly expansive and deeply moving, an intimate novel of secret lives and painful histories from one of the finest storytellers we have'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.' Meg Wolitzer Lilia Liska is 81. She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children and seen the arrival 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.Increasingly obsessed by 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 an incisive and deeply moving commentary. She reveals to us the surprising, long-held secrets of her past. And she returns inexorably to her daughter, Lucy, who took her own life at the age of 27.Must I Go is an unconventional epistolary novel, a gleefully one-way correspondence between the very-much-alive Lilia and the long-departed Roland. Though mortality is ever-present, this is ultimately a novel about life, in all its messy glory. Life lived, for the extraordinary Lilia, absolutely on its own terms. With exquisite subtlety and insight, Yiyun Li navigates the twin poles of grief and resilience, loss and rebirth, that compass a human heart.

‘One of our finest living authors … propulsively entertaining’ New York Times'Sly, profound … Electrifying' Observer‘Wonderfully strange and alive’ Jon McGregor A propulsive, seductive new novel about friendship, exploitation and intimacy from the prize-winning author of Where Reasons End Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised – the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now, Agnès is free to tell her story.As children in a backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves – until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss. ‘Beguiling … A shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation’ Daily Mail ‘Haunting and strange … Li has made her style her own’ Tessa Hadley, Guardian ‘A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout’ Charlotte Mendelson, author of The Exhibitionist

Brilliant and original, ‘A Thousand Years of Good Prayers’ introduces a remarkable first collection of stories about China from an author set to become a major literary talent.In this extraordinary first collection, Yiyun Li brings us a modern China facing up to a complex history of repression and guilt. In 'Immortality', winner of the Paris Review prize, a young man bears a striking resemblance to the dictator, and so finds a strange kind of calling. In 'Extra', first published in the New Yorker, a Chinese woman, alone in middle age, befriends a young boy who has become an outcast in a remote country school. In their friendship, we see how love can begin to overcome the strictures that dominate their lives.In turn horrifying and breathtakingly lyrical, Yiyun Li, a new and talented young Chinese writer, confronts the silence that dominated the history of her country, and illuminates how mythology, politics, history and culture intersect with personality. She leaves us with an enduring vision of a country undergoing tremendous change.

The much-anticipated first novel from the Guardian First Book Award-winning Chinese writer.In the provincial town of Muddy Waters in China, a young woman named Gu Shan is sentenced to death for her loss of faith in Communism. She is twenty-eight years old and has already spent ten years in prison. The citizens stage a protest after her death and, over the following six weeks, the town goes through uncertainty, hope and fear until eventually the rebellion is brutally suppressed. They are all taken on a painful journey, from one young woman's death to another.We follow the pain of Gu Shan's parents, the hope and fear of the leaders of the protest and their families. Even those who seem unconnected to the tragedy – an eleven-year-old boy seeking fame and glory, a nineteen-year-old village idiot in love with a young and deformed girl, an old couple making a living by scavenging the town's garbage cans – are caught up in a remorseless turn of events.Yiyun Li's novel is based on the true story which took place in China in 1979.

The new novel from Yiyun Li, author of The Vagrants and the Guardian First Book Award-winning A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.When Moran, Ruyu, and Boyang were young, they were involved in a mysterious ‘accident’ in which a young woman was poisoned. Now grown up, the three friends are separated by this incident, and by time and distance. Boyang stayed in China, while Moran and Ruyu emigrated to the United States. All three remain haunted by what really happened.A breathtaking page-turner, Kinder Than Solitude resonates with provocative observations about human nature and the virtues of loyalty. In mesmerizing prose, and with profound philosophical insight, Yiyun Li unfolds this remarkable story, even as she explores the impact of personality and the past on the shape of a person’s present and future.

The second collection of stories from Yiyun Li, author of the Guardian First Book Award-winning A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants.The stories in this collection, like the stories in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, are mostly set in China. The country portrayed here is the China of the 21st century, where economic development has led to new situations unknown to previous decades: residents in a shabby apartment building witnessing in awe the real estate boom; a local entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist sheltering women in trouble in her mansion; a group of retired women discovering fame late in their lives as private investigators specializing in extramarital affairs; a young woman setting up a blog to publicize an alleged affair of her father.Underneath the veneer of prosperity and opportunity, however, lie the struggles of characters trying to reorient themselves in the unfamiliar landscapes of modern China: a widower, reminiscing about his wife, confronts a young unmarried woman purchasing condoms in a pharmacy; a new wife makes a plea to have a baby with her husband who was to be executed only to discover that she has become an instant celebrity; a middle-aged couple in America, who, upon losing their only daughter, return to their hometown in China to hire a young woman as a surrogate mother. These characters' fates are affected as much by the historical moments in which they reside as by the choices they make.Yiyun Li's collection of stories is a report from the frontline of a changing world, and confirms Li to be an unmissable writer.

The new novel from Yiyun Li, author of The Vagrants and the Guardian First Book Award-winning A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.When Moran, Ruyu, and Boyang were young, they were involved in a mysterious `accident’ in which a young woman was poisoned. Now grown up, the three friends are separated by this incident, and by time and distance. Boyang stayed in China, while Moran and Ruyu emigrated to the United States. All three remain haunted by what really happened.A breathtaking page-turner, Kinder Than Solitude resonates with provocative observations about human nature and the virtues of loyalty. In mesmerizing prose, and with profound philosophical insight, Yiyun Li unfolds this remarkable story, even as she explores the impact of personality and the past on the shape of a person’s present and future.

Brilliant and original, `A Thousand Years of Good Prayers’ introduces a remarkable first collection of stories about China from an author set to become a major literary talent.In this extraordinary first collection, Yiyun Li brings us a modern China facing up to a complex history of repression and guilt. In 'Immortality', winner of the Paris Review prize, a young man bears a striking resemblance to the dictator, and so finds a strange kind of calling. In 'Extra', first published in the New Yorker, a Chinese woman, alone in middle age, befriends a young boy who has become an outcast in a remote country school. In their friendship, we see how love can begin to overcome the strictures that dominate their lives.In turn horrifying and breathtakingly lyrical, Yiyun Li, a new and talented young Chinese writer, confronts the silence that dominated the history of her country, and illuminates how mythology, politics, history and culture intersect with personality. She leaves us with an enduring vision of a country undergoing tremendous change.

The novel from the Guardian First Book Award-winning Chinese writer acclaimed by Michel Faber as having `the talent, the vision and the respect for life's insoluble mysteries to be a truly fine writer.’In the provincial town of Muddy Waters in China, a young woman named Gu Shan is sentenced to death for her loss of faith in Communism. She is twenty-eight years old and has already spent ten years in prison. The citizens stage a protest after her death and, over the following six weeks, the town goes through uncertainty, hope, and fear until eventually the rebellion is brutally suppressed.We follow the pain of Gu Shan's parents, the hope and fear of the leaders of the protest and their families. Even those who seem unconnected to the tragedy – an eleven-year-old boy seeking fame and glory, a nineteen-year-old village idiot in love with a young and deformed girl, and old couple making a living by scavenging the town's garbage cans – are caught up in remorseless turn of events.Yiyun Li's novel is based on the true story which took place in China in 1979.

Winner of the Sunday Times EFG Short Story PrizeAuntie Mei is a live-in nanny for newborns and their mothers. She has worked for a hundred and twenty-six families and looked after a hundred and thirty-one babies, one set of clients easily replaced by the next. But the hundred and thirty-second baby and his mother Chanel prompts a crisis in Auntie Mei’s life – a tremor that threatens to destroy her resolute detachment.

Winner of the Sunday Times EFG Short Story PrizeAuntie Mei is a live-in nanny for newborns and their mothers. She has worked for a hundred and twenty-six families and looked after a hundred and thirty-one babies, one set of clients easily replaced by the next. But the hundred and thirty-second baby and his mother Chanel prompts a crisis in Auntie Mei’s life – a tremor that threatens to destroy her resolute detachment.

'A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout – I loved it' Charlotte Mendelson‘One of our finest living authors … propulsively entertaining’ New York Times‘Wonderfully strange and alive’ Jon McGregorA propulsive, seductive new novel about friendship, exploitation and intimacy from the prize-winning author of Where Reasons EndFabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised – the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now, Agnès is free to tell her story.As children in a backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves – until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.A dark, ravishing tale winding from the rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school, to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnès can live without her past. The Book of Goose is a story of intimacy and obsession, friendship and rivalry perfect for fans of Elena Ferrante, Ottessa Moshfegh and Kamila Shamsie.‘Beguiling … A shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation’ Daily Mail‘Brilliant … A novel of deceptions and cruelty’ Spectator‘For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry…resonant with echoes of… My Brilliant Friend, as well Elizabeth Strout… electrifying’ Observer

'A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout – I loved it' Charlotte Mendelson‘One of our finest living authors … propulsively entertaining’ New York Times‘Wonderfully strange and alive’ Jon McGregor A propulsive, seductive new novel about friendship, exploitation and intimacy from the prize-winning author of Where Reasons End Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised – the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now, Agnès is free to tell her story.As children in a backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves – until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.A dark, ravishing tale winding from the rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school, to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnès can live without her past. The Book of Goose is a story of intimacy and obsession, friendship and rivalry perfect for fans of Elena Ferrante, Ottessa Moshfegh and Kamila Shamsie. ‘Beguiling … A shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation’ Daily Mail ‘Brilliant … A novel of deceptions and cruelty’ Spectator ‘For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry…resonant with echoes of… My Brilliant Friend, as well Elizabeth Strout… electrifying’ Observer

''A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout – I loved it'' Charlotte Mendelson‘One of our finest living authors … propulsively entertaining’ New York Times‘Wonderfully strange and alive’ Jon McGregorA propulsive, seductive new novel about friendship, exploitation and intimacy from the prize-winning author of Where Reasons EndFabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised – the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now, Agnès is free to tell her story.As children in a backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves – until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.A dark, ravishing tale winding from the rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school, to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnès can live without her past. The Book of Goose is a story of intimacy and obsession, friendship and rivalry perfect for fans of Elena Ferrante, Ottessa Moshfegh and Kamila Shamsie.‘Beguiling … A shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation’ Daily Mail‘Brilliant … A novel of deceptions and cruelty’ Spectator‘For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry…resonant with echoes of… My Brilliant Friend, as well Elizabeth Strout… electrifying’ Observer

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024 'Any book by Yiyun Li is a cause for celebration' SIGRID NUNEZ 'One of our finest living authors' NEW YORK TIMES 'Bruising, beautiful' GUARDIAN A dazzling new collection of short stories written over a decade, spanning loss, alienation, ageing and the strangeness of contemporary life – from Yiyun Li, the prize-winning author of The Book of Goose A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. A professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and grand mysterious forces – death, violence, estrangement – come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen.Li is a breathtakingly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and yet acutely aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering short stories and a remarkable novella never before published in the UK. Taken together, the stories in Wednesday's Child articulate the true cost of living with all Li’s trademark unnerving beauty and searing wisdom. ‘Quiet, subtle and often agonisingly wrenching … Li explores the brittle fractures within the human heart … A shimmering meditation’ FINANCIAL TIMES ‘Strands of melancholy are braided through Li’s tender, thoughtful stories’ DAILY MAIL ‘Against the backdrop of threat, Li’s characters meditate coolly on meaning and mortality’ OBSERVER

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024 'Any book by Yiyun Li is a cause for celebration' SIGRID NUNEZ 'One of our finest living authors' NEW YORK TIMES 'Bruising, beautiful' GUARDIAN A dazzling new collection of short stories written over a decade, spanning loss, alienation, ageing and the strangeness of contemporary life – from Yiyun Li, the prize-winning author of The Book of Goose A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. A professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and grand mysterious forces – death, violence, estrangement – come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen.Li is a breathtakingly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and yet acutely aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering short stories and a remarkable novella never before published in the UK. Taken together, the stories in Wednesday's Child articulate the true cost of living with all Li’s trademark unnerving beauty and searing wisdom. ‘Quiet, subtle and often agonisingly wrenching … Li explores the brittle fractures within the human heart … A shimmering meditation’ FINANCIAL TIMES ‘Strands of melancholy are braided through Li’s tender, thoughtful stories’ DAILY MAIL ‘Against the backdrop of threat, Li’s characters meditate coolly on meaning and mortality’ OBSERVER

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024 'Any book by Yiyun Li is a cause for celebration' SIGRID NUNEZ 'One of our finest living authors' NEW YORK TIMES 'Bruising, beautiful' GUARDIAN A dazzling new collection of short stories written over a decade, spanning loss, alienation, ageing and the strangeness of contemporary life – from Yiyun Li, the prize-winning author of The Book of Goose A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. A professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and grand mysterious forces – death, violence, estrangement – come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen.Li is a breathtakingly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and yet acutely aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering short stories and a remarkable novella never before published in the UK. Taken together, the stories in Wednesday's Child articulate the true cost of living with all Li’s trademark unnerving beauty and searing wisdom. ‘Quiet, subtle and often agonisingly wrenching … Li explores the brittle fractures within the human heart … A shimmering meditation’ FINANCIAL TIMES ‘Strands of melancholy are braided through Li’s tender, thoughtful stories’ DAILY MAIL ‘Against the backdrop of threat, Li’s characters meditate coolly on meaning and mortality’ OBSERVER

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024''Any book by Yiyun Li is a cause for celebration'' SIGRID NUNEZ''One of our finest living authors'' NEW YORK TIMES''Bruising, beautiful'' GUARDIANA dazzling new collection of short stories written over a decade, spanning loss, alienation, ageing and the strangeness of contemporary life – from Yiyun Li, the prize-winning author of The Book of GooseA grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. A professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and grand mysterious forces – death, violence, estrangement – come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen.Li is a breathtakingly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and yet acutely aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering short stories and a remarkable novella never before published in the UK. Taken together, the stories in Wednesday''s Child articulate the true cost of living with all Li’s trademark unnerving beauty and searing wisdom.‘Quiet, subtle and often agonisingly wrenching … Li explores the brittle fractures within the human heart … A shimmering meditation’ FINANCIAL TIMES‘Strands of melancholy are braided through Li’s tender, thoughtful stories’ DAILY MAIL‘Against the backdrop of threat, Li’s characters meditate coolly on meaning and mortality’ OBSERVER

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024 'Any book by Yiyun Li is a cause for celebration' SIGRID NUNEZ 'One of our finest living authors' NEW YORK TIMES 'Bruising, beautiful' GUARDIAN A dazzling new collection of short stories written over a decade, spanning loss, alienation, ageing and the strangeness of contemporary life – from Yiyun Li, the prize-winning author of The Book of Goose A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. A professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and grand mysterious forces – death, violence, estrangement – come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen.Li is a breathtakingly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and yet acutely aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering short stories and a remarkable novella never before published in the UK. Taken together, the stories in Wednesday's Child articulate the true cost of living with all Li’s trademark unnerving beauty and searing wisdom. ‘Quiet, subtle and often agonisingly wrenching … Li explores the brittle fractures within the human heart … A shimmering meditation’ FINANCIAL TIMES ‘Strands of melancholy are braided through Li’s tender, thoughtful stories’ DAILY MAIL ‘Against the backdrop of threat, Li’s characters meditate coolly on meaning and mortality’ OBSERVER

''A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout – I loved it'' Charlotte Mendelson‘One of our finest living authors … propulsively entertaining’ New York Times‘Wonderfully strange and alive’ Jon McGregorA propulsive, seductive new novel about friendship, exploitation and intimacy from the prize-winning author of Where Reasons EndFabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised – the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now, Agnès is free to tell her story.As children in a backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves – until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.A dark, ravishing tale winding from the rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school, to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnès can live without her past. The Book of Goose is a story of intimacy and obsession, friendship and rivalry perfect for fans of Elena Ferrante, Ottessa Moshfegh and Kamila Shamsie.‘Beguiling … A shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation’ Daily Mail‘Brilliant … A novel of deceptions and cruelty’ Spectator‘For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry…resonant with echoes of… My Brilliant Friend, as well Elizabeth Strout… electrifying’ Observer

‘May well be the most perfectly constructed, moving, and beautiful novel I've ever read’ ANN PATCHETT Acclaimed Pulitzer-Prize winner Yiyun Li, returns with a sweeping historical epic, following two extraordinary musicians on the rise. In Dublin, as the eighteenth century nears its end, a young musical virtuoso comes of age. John Field is able to hear notes in the air, and his family aspires for him to become the next Mozart. His talent takes him far – to England, France, and then Russia, where he becomes a famous pianist and composes dreamy melodies that enchant the night air. John calls them nocturnes, but the prodigy who immortalizes them is Chopin.Oceans away in Pondicherry, French India, Adelaide Percheron embarks on a startling rise of her own. Orphaned at a young age, she is raised by her enterprising grandmother. Without the luxury of riches, only marriage seems to offer prosperity – until she sets her sights on a pianoforte. Driven by her love of music, she engineers her exodus, escaping to Paris and later to Moscow, as Napoleon’s army sets out to conquer the continent.Peopled by rival prodigies, irate tutors and begrudging guardians, Yiyun Li’s magisterial novel depicts two aspiring musicians – destined to be husband and wife – in pursuit of success. As John and Adelaide each try to chart a path between talent and genius, profit and passion, they must decide what, and even who, is worth sacrificing along the way.Drawing inspiration from the past but finding entirely new forms, Music Against the Night is an exquisite, exhilarating epic from a writer at the height of her powers.

‘May well be the most perfectly constructed, moving, and beautiful novel I've ever read’ ANN PATCHETT Acclaimed Pulitzer-Prize winner Yiyun Li, returns with a sweeping historical epic, following two extraordinary musicians on the rise. In Dublin, as the eighteenth century nears its end, a young musical virtuoso comes of age. John Field is able to hear notes in the air, and his family aspires for him to become the next Mozart. His talent takes him far – to England, France, and then Russia, where he becomes a famous pianist and composes dreamy melodies that enchant the night air. John calls them nocturnes, but the prodigy who immortalizes them is Chopin.Oceans away in Pondicherry, French India, Adelaide Percheron embarks on a startling rise of her own. Orphaned at a young age, she is raised by her enterprising grandmother. Without the luxury of riches, only marriage seems to offer prosperity – until she sets her sights on a pianoforte. Driven by her love of music, she engineers her exodus, escaping to Paris and later to Moscow, as Napoleon’s army sets out to conquer the continent.Peopled by rival prodigies, irate tutors and begrudging guardians, Yiyun Li’s magisterial novel depicts two aspiring musicians – destined to be husband and wife – in pursuit of success. As John and Adelaide each try to chart a path between talent and genius, profit and passion, they must decide what, and even who, is worth sacrificing along the way.Drawing inspiration from the past but finding entirely new forms, Music Against the Night is an exquisite, exhilarating epic from a writer at the height of her powers.

''Unforgettable'' SUNDAY TIMES''Courageous'' OBSERVER''One of the most important books to be published in years'' SARA COLLINS''There are few writers with Li’s power'' DOUGLAS STUARTThe best book I have read this year’ DAVID NICHOLLS''I will return to it for the rest of my life'' CHARLOTTE WOODA remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance from acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist Yiyun Li as she considers the loss of her son James.''There is no good way to say this,'' Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.''There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.''There is no good way to say this – because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, ''a single point in a timeline''. Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving. As Li writes, ''The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.'' Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.As seen in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, LA Times, TIME, and the Paris Review. ''To state that this courageous book is a testament to love is an understatement. One is left altered by it'' OBSERVER''A story of loss that is unlike any other book I''ve read … an unforgettable monument to endurance'' SUNDAY TIMES''Resolutely unsentimental, and yet it might wind you with its emotional force'' GUARDIAN''A memoir unlike others, strange and profound and fiercely determined not to look away'' NEW YORK TIMES''An extraordinary book’ SARAH MOSS''A manifesto of living, not dying, and of how we endure the most unimaginable things'' SINÉAD GLEESON, in THE WEEK''A profound look at how a parent continues to live in a world without her children’TIME‘A book unlike any I''ve read, that brims with rare clarity and intelligence, with love and care. It will stay with me for a long time’ CECILE PIN

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR MEMOIR 2026 LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2025 ‘The best book I have read this year’ DAVID NICHOLLS‘Masterly … I'm in awe’ SALMAN RUSHDIE‘Beautiful’ DOUGLAS STUART‘Extraordinary’ SARAH MOSS‘A formidable testament to a mother’s love’ SARA COLLINS‘There is no good way to say this,’ Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.‘There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.’There is no good way to say this – because words fall short. In this remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance, Li turns to thinking and searching for words that might hold a place for her son, James. Li does ‘the things that work’: including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit. Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction 2026 Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Awards 2025 Finalist for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction 2025 ‘To state that this courageous book is a testament to love is an understatement. One is left altered by it’ Observer ‘Unlike any other book I've read … an unforgettable monument to endurance’ Sunday Times ‘A book that has not a single spare word in it … I loved it so much’ Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake ‘A meditation on living and radical acceptance’ Guardian ‘A memoir unlike others, strange and profound and fiercely determined not to look away’ New York Times ‘One of the most astounding memoirs I have ever read’ Pandora Sykes, author of How Do We Know We're Doing It Right? ‘I will return to it for the rest of my life’ Charlotte Wood, author of Stone Yard Devotional‘A manifesto of living, not dying’ Sinéad Gleeson, The Week