Yiyun Li

'Profoundly moving. An astonishing book, a true work of art' Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers 'Heart-wrenching, fearless, and unlike anything you've ever read' Esquire 'I sit here shaken and, I think, changed by this work' Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers 'A devastating read, but also a tender one, filled with love, complexity, and a desire for understanding' Nylon 'The most intelligent, insightful, heart-wrenching book of our time' Sean Andrew Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less 'Captures the affections and complexity of parenthood in a way that has never been portrayed before' The Millions 'Ethereal and electric, radiating unthinkable pain and profound love' Buzzfeed From the critically acclaimed author of The Vagrants, a devastating and utterly original novel on grief and motherhood '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 itself, and he will speak back to her, unable to offer explanation or solace, but not yet, not quite, gone. 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. Praise for Yiyun Li: 'A masterpiece...[Puts] you in mind of Tolstoy or Chekhov' Sunday Times on The Vagrants 'This is a book of immense power and it will leave you reeling' New Statesman on The Vagrants 'Controlled understatement, scrupulous and unsparing lucidity... A work of great moral poise and dignity.I have not read such a compelling work in years' Independent

Where Reasons End

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The essence of growing up is to play hide-and-seek with one’s mother successfully, Nikolai said.

All children win, I said. Mothers are bad at seeking.

Days are not the only place where we live, Nikolai said.

Time is not the only place where we live, I said. Days are.

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We can always be good, do better, try our best, but how perfect can we be before we can love ourselves and let others love us? And who, my dear child, has taken the word lovable out of your dictionary and mine, and replaced it with perfect?

When I was in fourth grade I thought something must be wrong with my childhood, he said. It was too happy, never like what you read in literature.

I remember you saying that, I said. Is it parents’ failure, I thought, if they’ve given their children a happy childhood that does not last?

Where Reasons End quotes

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