Description

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

Publisher Review

Praise for Yiyun Li 'Any new book by Yiyun Li is cause for celebration, but now more than ever do we need the clarity and humaneness of her vision' Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend 'Li is extraordinary - a storyteller of the first order. She inhabits the lives of her characters with such force and compassion that one cannot help but marvel' Junot Diaz, author of This is How You Lose Her 'Few writers match Yiyun Li's ability to explore human desire and ambition ... One of the great writers of our time' Tash Aw, author of We, the Survivors 'Yiyun Li writes deeply, drolly, and with elegance about history, even as it's happening. She is one of my favourite writers' Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion 'Li writes with a shimmering and deeply felt precision' Guardian 'Li's books render the world so sharply that they might draw blood' Los Angeles Times 'Li narrates from the fringes of her own experience ... She insists on her own uncategorizable perspective, breaking rules in a sly, stubborn way' Alexandra Kleeman, New York Times