‘One of our major novelists’ Salman Rushdie ‘One of our finest living authors’ New York Times A dazzling new collection of short stories, spanning 15 years of writing, from Yiyun Li, the prize-winning author of The Book of Goose and Where Reasons End A dazzling new collection of short stories written over a decade, spanning loss, alienation, aging 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.

A reader's companion for Tolstoy's epic novel, War and Peace, inspired by the online book club led by Yiyun Li.
For the writer Yiyun Li, whenever life has felt uncertain, War and Peace has been the novel she turns to. In March 2020, as the pandemic tightened its grip, Li and A Public Space launched #TolstoyTogether, a War and Peace book club, on Twitter and Instagram, gathering a community (that came to include writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, Garth Greenwell, and Carl Phillips) for 85 days of prompts, conversation, succor, and pleasure. It was an experience shaped not only by the time in which they read but also the slow, consistent rhythm of the reading. And the extraordinary community that gathered for a moment each day to discuss Tolstoy, history, and the role of art in a time like this. Tolstoy Together captures that moment, and offers a guided, communal experience for past and new readers, lovers of Russian literature, and all those looking for what Li identifies as "his level-headedness and clear-sightedness offer[ing] a solidity during a time of duress.

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.

Daily Mail
'These mesmerising stories present a glimpse of modern China more
nuanced than any reporter could ever hop to gleam.'
Melanie McGrath, Evening Standard
'a wonderfully well-written, fascinating and affecting collection
of stories.'

The Observer
'Li's moving, engrossing stories are particular in their
place...but universal in their themes and their relevance.'
Impac News
'If you have ever wondered what life is like in modern China...you
should read this book...'
Sunday Times
'Readers should pray that Yiyun’s memorable collection is the first of many.' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Synopsis
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.

Written in the grip of suicidal depression, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life is an uplifting account of what makes life worth living. Yiyun Li interweaves personal experiences of her childhood in China and her adulthood forging a new life in America with meditations on the many writers she admires - from William Trevor to Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf to Ivan Turgenev. And with quiet integrity, she confirms the fundamental questions that define an author - why write? And why live?