2020 PEN/Faulkner Award (nominee)
A fearless writer confronts grief and transforms it into art, in a book of surprising beauty and love, "a masterpiece by a master" (Elizabeth McCracken, Vanity Fair ).
"Li has converted the messy and devastating stuff of life into a remarkable work of art."--The Wall Street Journal
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.
Praise for Where Reasons End
"Where Reasons End belongs to a band of books produced in the forge of intense pain; their authors, aristocrats of suffering -- think of The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, Joan Didion's memoirs of the deaths of her husband and daughter in close succession. . . . For Li, to apply her own language to suicide means to understand suicide as the most private of decisions, to address it without cheap sentiment or condemnation. . . . As the title alerts us, this book takes place in a territory beyond reason, in all its connotations--beyond explanation or understanding. The mother does not require them. In the final reckoning, there is nothing she needs from Nikolai other than his company, his ghost; to carry him for a moment more, to keep the story going."--The New York Times
"This expansive, heartfelt examination of grief in novel form moves through a series of conversations between the mourning mother and her elusive, yet vividly present son. This utterly original novel will move anyone who has experienced loss in any form."--Jan Weissmiller, Forbes
"Yiyun Li's gutting novel imagines a conversation between a mother and child, months after the child's suicide. The prose is ethereal and electric, radiating unthinkable pain and profound love."--BuzzFeed
Genre: Literary Fiction
"Li has converted the messy and devastating stuff of life into a remarkable work of art."--The Wall Street Journal
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.
Praise for Where Reasons End
"Where Reasons End belongs to a band of books produced in the forge of intense pain; their authors, aristocrats of suffering -- think of The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, Joan Didion's memoirs of the deaths of her husband and daughter in close succession. . . . For Li, to apply her own language to suicide means to understand suicide as the most private of decisions, to address it without cheap sentiment or condemnation. . . . As the title alerts us, this book takes place in a territory beyond reason, in all its connotations--beyond explanation or understanding. The mother does not require them. In the final reckoning, there is nothing she needs from Nikolai other than his company, his ghost; to carry him for a moment more, to keep the story going."--The New York Times
"This expansive, heartfelt examination of grief in novel form moves through a series of conversations between the mourning mother and her elusive, yet vividly present son. This utterly original novel will move anyone who has experienced loss in any form."--Jan Weissmiller, Forbes
"Yiyun Li's gutting novel imagines a conversation between a mother and child, months after the child's suicide. The prose is ethereal and electric, radiating unthinkable pain and profound love."--BuzzFeed
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"This book finds singular language for inexpressible grief, while admitting the limits of that language at every turn...it's a book about infinite sadness and desperate imagination, it charts the strange landscape of their overlap; it's humble about the mystery of others, and the edges of what we can ever know about them... It's one of the most moving books I've ever read." - Leslie Jamison
"Profoundly moving. An astonishing book, a true work of art." - Max Porter
"The most intelligent, insightful, heart-wrenching book of our time." - Andrew Sean Greer
"Profoundly moving. An astonishing book, a true work of art." - Max Porter
"The most intelligent, insightful, heart-wrenching book of our time." - Andrew Sean Greer
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