Wednesdays Child

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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 shes 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 Lis 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 Lis 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 Lis tender, thoughtful stories Daily Mail

Against the backdrop of threat, Lis characters meditate coolly on meaning and mortality Observer

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 Lis 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 Lis dense fiction weaves together history, memory, and experience challenging and delighting at every turn World Literature Today

Timeless [Lis] once again shown us why shes 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 Lis frankness, tact, and humour Vulture

A beautiful meditation on life and all its nuances Shondaland

Author Bio

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. Lis 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.