Yiyun Li

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

''Kafka himself would love it'' The i''As captivating as it is thought-provoking'' Glamour''Unsettling and uneasy'' Daily Mail''Glorious'' Harper''s BazaarA collection of brand-new short stories written by major international writers and inspired by Kafka What happens when Kafka''s idionsyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? In this collection of stories, commissioned to commemorate one hundred years since his death, ten of our most celebrated international writers take ideas of Kafka''s - motifs from his stories, titles of his famous works, or unfinished fragments left behind in his Blue Octavo Notebooks - and run with them to make something new.

A 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 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 propulsive, seductive new novel about friendship, exploitation and intimacy from the prize-winning author of Where Reasons End Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnés, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised – the place that Fabienne helped Agn?s escape ten years ago. Now, Agnés 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 Agnés on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.

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

A cabinet of curiosities, a time machine, a treasure trove - we love bookshops because they possess a unique kind of magic. In Browse Henry Hitchings asks fifteen writers from around the world to reveal their favourite bookshops, each conjuring a specific time and place. Ali Smith chronicles the secrets and personal stories hidden within the pages of secondhand books; Alaa Al Aswany tells of the Cairo bookshop where revolutionaries gathered during the 2011 uprisings; Elif Shafak evokes the bookstores of Istanbul, their chaos and diversity, their aroma of tobacco and coffee. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor recalls the quandary of choosing just one book at a favourite childhood store in Nairobi, while Iain Sinclair shares his grief on witnessing a beloved old haunt close down. Others explore bookshops they have stumbled upon, adored and become addicted to, from Delhi to Bogota. These inquisitive, enchanting pieces are a collective celebration of bookshops - for anyone who has ever fallen under their spell. Contributors include: Alaa Al Aswany (Egypt) Stefano Benni (Italy) Michael Dirda (USA) Daniel Kehlmann (Germany) Andrey Kurkov (Ukraine) Yiyun Li (China) Pankaj Mishra (India) Dorthe Nors (Denmark) Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenya) Elif Shafak (Turkey) Ian Sansom (UK) Iain Sinclair (UK) Ali Smith (UK) Sasa Stanisic (Germany/Bosnia) Juan Gabriel Vasquez (Colombia)