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A fearless writer confronts grief and transforms it into art, in a book of surprising beauty and love.
The narrator of Where Reasons End writes, "I had but one delusion, which I held on to with all my willpower: We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I'm doing it over again, this time by words."
Yiyun Li meets life's deepest sorrows as she imagines a conversation between a mother and child in a timeless world. Composed in the months after she lost a child to suicide, Where Reasons End trespasses into the space between life and death as mother and child talk, free from old images and narratives. Deeply moving, these conversations portray the love and complexity of a relationship.
Written with originality, precision, and poise, Where Reasons End is suffused with intimacy, inescapable pain, and fierce love.
"Starred Review. Sentences, paragraphs, pages later, Li transforms tragedy into a desperate miracle of survival." - Library Journal
"This is a unique, poignant, and tender evocation of life as touched irrevocably by death." - Publishers Weekly
"A tender, haunting meditation on loss." - Kirkus
"The most intelligent, insightful, heart-wrenching book of our time. I will be pressing this into everybody's hands, saying: 'Read this, read this now.'" - Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less
"I received Yiyun Li's galley tonight, began almost against my will, and have now just closed it. Some of the words forming are ones that Nikolai would find fault with so I will swallow them. But I sit here shaken and, I think, changed by this work." - Katherine Boo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers
"Where Reasons End is about the saddest thing in the world, and yet the experience of reading it is mysterious and expansive, as though the limits of all things' - language, love, and life' - are further than we ever imagined. These stories' - astonishing in their compassion, their scope, their private jokes, and their longing' - are for anyone who has ever wished that a loved one could have found a way to stay a little longer. An extraordinary book by one of our most extraordinary writers." - Elizabeth McCracken, author of Thunderstruck & Other Stories
This information about Where Reasons End was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Yiyun Li is the author of six works of fiction—Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her work has also appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University.
Name Pronunciation
Yiyun Li: ee-yoon lee
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Polite conversation is rarely either.
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