In this prize-winning collection of short stories, Yiyun Li brings us a modern China facing up to a complex history of repression and guilt.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Literature & Fiction

Li, Yiyun

Contemporary

Harper-perennial

The much-anticipated first novel from the Guardian First Book Award-winning Chinese writer.
In the provincial town of Muddy Waters in China, a young woman named Gu Shan is sentenced to death for her loss of faith in Communism. She is twenty-eight years old and has already spent ten years in prison. The citizens stage a protest after her death and, over the following six weeks, the town goes through uncertainty, hope and fear until eventually the rebellion is brutally suppressed. They are all taken on a painful journey, from one young woman's death to another.
We follow the pain of Gu Shan's parents, the hope and fear of the leaders of the protest and their families. Even those who seem unconnected to the tragedy – an eleven-year-old boy seeking fame and glory, a nineteen-year-old village idiot in love with a young and deformed girl, an old couple making a living by scavenging the town's garbage cans – are caught up in a remorseless turn of events.
Yiyun Li's novel is based on the true story which took place in China in 1979.

The Vagrants

Fourth Estate

The second collection of stories from Yiyun Li, author of the Guardian First Book Award-winning 'A Thousand Years of Good Prayers' and 'The Vagrants'.

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

When moran, ruyu and boyang were young, they were involved in a mysterious 'accident' in which a young woman was poisoned. Now grown up, the three friends are separated by this incident and by time and distance. Boyang stayed in china, while moran and ruyu emigrated to the united states. All three remain haunted by what really happened. A breathtaking page-turner, kinder than solitude resonates with provocative observations about human nature and the virtues of loyalty. In mesmerizing prose and with profound philosophical insight, yiyun li unfolds this remarkable story, even as she explores the impact of personality and the past on the shape of a person's present and future.

Kinder Than Solitude

HarperCollins, Publishers

Title: Kinder Than Solitude Binding: Hardcover Author: YiyunLi Publisher: RandomHouse

Must I Go: a novel

Hamish Hamilton

Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life

'Profoundly engaging in depth, with remarkable subtlety and rare, limpid beauty. A must-read' - Mary Gaitskill
A luminous memoir about reading, writing and how to find meaning in a life
Written over two years while the author battled depression, Dear Friend is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living. Interweaving personal memoir with a wide-ranging celebration of writers and books, this is a journey of recovery through literature.
From William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield to Kierkegaard and Larkin, Yiyun Li traces the themes of time and transformation, presence and absence. Drawing on personal experiences from her difficult childhood in China, she constructs a beautiful, interior exploration of selfhood and what is required to choose life.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Diseases & Physical Ailments

Penguin

Richly expansive and deeply moving, an intimate novel of secret lives and painful histories from one of the finest storytellers we have\n'This brilliant novel examines lives lived, losses accumulated, and the slipperiness of perception. Yiyun Li writes deeply, drolly, and with elegance about history, even as it's happening. She is one of my favorite writers, and Must I Go is an extraordinary book.' Meg Wolitzer\nLilia 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.\nIncreasingly 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.\nMust 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.

Must I Go: Yiyun Li

About the Author\nYiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction―Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl―and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University.\nLong-listed for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice\nA Slate Top Ten Book of the Year 
A TIME Best Fiction Book of 2022\nNamed a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Financial Times, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Buzzfeed, and more.\nA magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to the quiet Pennsylvania home where a woman can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength of will, by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.\nFabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised―the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now Agnès is free to tell her story.\nAs children in a war-ravaged backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves―until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.

The Book of Goose: A Novel

United States

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Li, Yiyun. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Li, Yiyun

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Li, Yiyun. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

The Vagrants

The Vagrants

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

Kinder Than Solitude

Kinder Than Solitude

Must I Go: a novel

Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life

Must I Go: Yiyun Li

The Book of Goose: A Novel