Audiobooks by Yiyun Li

"'Unforgettable' SUNDAY TIMES 'Courageous' OBSERVER 'One of the most important books to be published in years' SARA COLLINS 'There are few writers with Li’s power' DOUGLAS STUART The best book I have read this year’ DAVID NICHOLLS 'I will return to it for the rest of my life' CHARLOTTE WOOD A remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance from acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist Yiyun Li as she considers the loss of her son James. '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. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, 'a single point in a timeline'. Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving. As Li writes, 'The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.' Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit. As seen in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, LA Times, TIME, and the Paris Review. 'To state that this courageous book is a testament to love is an understatement. One is left altered by it' OBSERVER 'A story of loss that is unlike any other book I've read … an unforgettable monument to endurance' SUNDAY TIMES 'Resolutely unsentimental, and yet it might wind you with its emotional force' GUARDIAN 'A memoir unlike others, strange and profound and fiercely determined not to look away' NEW YORK TIMES 'An extraordinary book’ SARAH MOSS 'A manifesto of living, not dying, and of how we endure the most unimaginable things' SINÉAD GLEESON, in THE WEEK 'A profound look at how a parent continues to live in a world without her children’ TIME ‘A book unlike any I've read, that brims with rare clarity and intelligence, with love and care. It will stay with me for a long time’ CECILE PIN"

Yiyun Li (Author), Suzanne Toren (Narrator)

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Wednesday’s Child

"Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024 'Any book by Yiyun Li is a cause for celebration' SIGRID NUNEZ 'One of our finest living authors' NEW YORK TIMES 'Bruising, beautiful' GUARDIAN 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. ‘Quiet, subtle and often agonisingly wrenching … Li explores the brittle fractures within the human heart … A shimmering meditation’ FINANCIAL TIMES ‘Strands of melancholy are braided through Li’s tender, thoughtful stories’ DAILY MAIL ‘Against the backdrop of threat, Li’s characters meditate coolly on meaning and mortality’ OBSERVER"

Yiyun Li (Author), Yiyun Li (Narrator)

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The Book of Goose

"'A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout – I loved it' Charlotte Mendelson ‘One of our finest living authors … propulsively entertaining’ New York Times ‘Wonderfully strange and alive’ Jon McGregor 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, 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. 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 Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss. A dark, ravishing tale winding from the rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school, to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnès can live without her past. The Book of Goose is a story of intimacy and obsession, friendship and rivalry perfect for fans of Elena Ferrante, Ottessa Moshfegh and Kamila Shamsie. ‘Beguiling … A shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation’ Daily Mail ‘Brilliant … A novel of deceptions and cruelty’ Spectator ‘For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry…resonant with echoes of… My Brilliant Friend, as well Elizabeth Strout… electrifying’ Observer"

Yiyun Li (Author), Caroline Hewitt (Narrator)

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Must I Go

"Brought to you by Penguin. Richly expansive and deeply moving, an intimate novel of secret lives and painful histories from one of the finest storytellers we have '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 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. © Yiyun Li 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020"

Yiyun Li (Author), Alex Mckenna, Jane Alexander, John Rubinstein (Narrator)

Audiobook

Where Reasons End

"Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li. '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 a friend 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 (Author), Cassandra Campbell (Narrator)

Audiobook

A Sheltered Woman

"Winner of the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize Auntie Mei is a live-in nanny for newborns and their mothers. She has worked for a hundred and twenty-six families and looked after a hundred and thirty-one babies, one set of clients easily replaced by the next. But the hundred and thirty-second baby and his mother Chanel prompts a crisis in Auntie Mei’s life – a tremor that threatens to destroy her resolute detachment."

Yiyun Li (Author), Laurence Bouvard (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Story of Gilgamesh

"Godlike Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, has built a beautiful city, but is also a terrible tyrant. In answer to the prayers of his oppressed citizens, the gods create Enkidu, a wild man whose destiny is to first fight Gilgamesh, and then become his life-long friend. They embark on adventures together, but when they kill the Bull of Heaven, Enkidu must pay the ultimate price."

Yiyun Li (Author), Jonathan Keeble (Narrator)

Audiobook