About the Author

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China, and came to the United States in 1996. She is the recipient of several prizes for her writing and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Li’s stories have been published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, USA, with her husband and their two sons.

Reviews

‘Quiet, subtle and often agonisingly wrenching … A shimmering meditation’ Financial Times 'Affecting' The Pulitzer Prize ‘Tender, thoughtful’ Daily Mail ‘Grief, survival, aftermath … Many of the pieces center on the painful unspooling of memories as life continues’ Observer ‘Stories of mourning and intimacy … full of wonder’ Times Literary Supplement ‘One of our finest practitioners of the short story form … Packed with extraordinary beauty and quiet devastation, these stories cut quick and deep, like a knife in the dark’ Esquire ‘A skilled impressionist' The New York Times Book Review ‘Strange and distinctive’ The Wall Street Journal ‘A collection to savour, contemplate and return to’ Culture Whisper 'A gorgeous almanac of the world of pain’ Kirkus ‘Absorb the brilliance of Li’s prose … honour the breathtaking heartbreak trapped within’ Booklist ‘Splendid and elegantly observed … These stories find Li at the top of her game’ Publishers Weekly ‘[Li] has the gift of making every story feel like a discovery, freshly unearthed’ Louis Bayard, 2022 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story Citation ‘One of the foremost fiction writers in America … Li’s dense fiction weaves together history, memory, and experience … challenging and delighting at every turn’ World Literature Today ‘Timeless … [Li’s] once again shown us why she’s remained such a treasured guide to the lands of grief over the past twenty-plus years’ Chicago Review of Books ‘Few writers tackle the way grief reverberates through our lives with Li’s frankness, tact, and humour’ Vulture ‘A beautiful meditation on life and all its nuances’ Shondaland