Description
Book SynopsisFinalist 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,
Trade Review Praise for Wednesday’s Child
‘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
‘Grief, survival, aftermath: these are the themes of Yiyun Li’s new book … Many of the pieces centre on the painful unspooling of memories as life continues’ Observer
‘Each story exposes a tender nub of humanity, captured with quietly devastating force in Li's artful prose. This is a collection to savour, contemplate and return to’ Culture Whisper
Praise for Yiyun Li
‘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’ Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend
‘Li is extraordinary – a storyteller of the first order. She inhabits the lives of her characters with such force and compassion that one cannot help but marvel’ Junot Díaz, author of This is How You Lose Her
‘Few writers match Yiyun Li’s ability to explore human desire and ambition … One of the great writers of our time’ Tash Aw, author of We, the Survivors
'Yiyun Li writes deeply, drolly, and with elegance about history, even as it’s happening. She is one of my favourite writers' Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion
‘Li writes with a shimmering and deeply felt precision’ Guardian
‘Li’s books render the world so sharply that they might draw blood’ Los Angeles Times
‘Li narrates from the fringes of her own experience … She insists on her own uncategorizable perspective, breaking rules in a sly, stubborn way’ Alexandra Kleeman, New York Times
