Where Reasons End

Description

A devastating and utterly original portrait of motherhood and grief 'Days- the easiest possession. The days he had refused would come, one at a time. They would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into an ally or an enemy to myself.' 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, and he will speak back to her, unable to offer explanation or solace, but not yet, not quite, gone. Taking the form of a dialogue between mother and son, 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.

Yiyun Li is the author of three novels, Where Reasons End, The Vagrants and Kinder Than Solitude, and two short-story collections, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, as well as the memoir, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She has won literary awards including the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was listed among Granta's 21 Best of Young American Novelists 2007. Her stories have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review and elsewhere. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of a Windham-Campbell Prize and a Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University.

an incredible piece of work * Chris Power, Open Book * a disquieting, delicate, affecting book * Irish Times * One of the most moving books I've ever read. * Leslie Jamison * Profoundly moving. An astonishing book, a true work of art. * Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers * The writing is raw and deeply affecting. * The Times * Heart-rending * The Sunday Times * Li writes with a shimmering and deeply felt precision. * Guardian * Unsentimental, brave and beautiful. An absolutely monumental book. * Daily Mail * The most intelligent, insightful, heart-wrenching book of our time. -- Andrew Sean Greer A masterpiece. This book haunts me more than any other novel I've read in recent years. -- Garth Greenwell A highly unusual novel in which a writer confronts one of life's deepest sorrows in losing her child. . . Funny, touching and profoundly moving -- Chigozie Obioma