Wednesday's Child

'One of our finest living authors ... propulsively entertaining' New York Times'Sly, profound ... Electrifying' Observer'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.'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

Richly expansive and deeply moving, an intimate novel of secret lives and painful histories from one of the finest storytellers we have<BR><BR>'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 <BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR MEMOIR 2026LONGLISTED 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 2026Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Awards 2025Finalist 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

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