Where Reasons End

by Yiyun Li

'Profoundly moving. An astonishing book, a true work of art' Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers

'A masterpiece. This book haunts me more than any other novel I've read in recent years' Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

'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

• ISBN10: 0241366909
• ISBN13: 9780241366905
• Publish Date: 7 February 2019 (first published 5 February 2019)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 29 June 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Imprint: Hamish Hamilton Ltd
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 192
• Language: English

Reviews

[Bianca]

How are you today? I said. It was an inane question but I was too sad to look for a better opening.

Why don’t people start a conversation by saying, Who are you today? Nikolai said. How anyone is matters less than who he is, don’t you think?

Who are you, I said. It sounds intrusive, does it not?

How are you—is it less intrusive? If someone does want to know the answer it’s intrusive too.

Who are you? I went over the question in my head. I suppose people would have a harder time saying who they are, truly, I said. Or there are so many possibilities it’s hard to give one and neglect the other twenty.

When you see a tree, do you say, How are you today? Mediocre, the tree may think, because it’s a windy day. But it’s obliged to reply, I’m good, thank you, and you? No, when you see a tree you think, Here is a tree.

People are more complex than trees, I said.

We think we are, he said. So, who are you today?

I’m your mother.

A book about an imagined conversation between a mother and her son lost to suicide. I liked some parts of this, but mostly this didn’t really move me, which I feel bad about, knowing that the author herself actually experienced losing her son this way :(