Description

‘One of our finest living authors … propulsively entertaining’ New York Times
‘Sly, profound … Electrifying’ Observer
‘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, Agnes, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised – the place that Fabienne helped Agnes escape ten years ago. Now, Agnes 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 Agnes on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.

‘Beguiling … A shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation’ Daily Mail

‘Haunting and strange … Li has made her style her own’ Tessa Hadley, Guardian

‘A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout’ Charlotte Mendelson, author of The Exhibitionist

Publisher Review

'Fans of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan trilogy won't be disappointed, but the comparison undermines the skill with which Li tells her story, peeling back the layers to reveal the dark truths at the heart of Agnes and Fabienne's friendship' Marie Claire '[Li] has become ... one of our finest living authors: Her elegant metaphysics never elide the blood and maggots ... The most propulsively entertaining of Li's novels... an existential fable that illuminates the tangle of motives behind our writing of stories' New York Times 'Beguiling ... A shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation' Daily Mail 'These two perverse, dangerous, glorious girls are their own creation and their own destiny, captured in the high noon of their lives' Observer New Review 'Resonant with echoes of... My Brilliant Friend, as well as authors including Elizabeth Strout and William Trevor ... For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry' Observer 'Brilliant ... A novel of deceptions and cruelty' Spectator 'Dazzling, subtle, skilful ... I loved it' Charlotte Mendelson, author of The Exhibitionist 'In a story about love and creation, Yiyun Li slips in a satire of the business of marketing authors... deft and delicious' Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Starling Days 'Yiyun Li has, again, done something new and gone somewhere wonderfully strange and alive. Beautiful, sad, funny and claustrophobic' Jon McGregor, author of Lean Fall Stand 'A haunting novel about loss, friendship and storytelling ... Few writers match Yiyun Li's ability to explore human desire and ambition' Tash Aw, author of Strangers on a Pier 'Meet Agnes and Fabienne...Come for the writerly scheming, stay for the exquisitely calibrated examination of how our most tender and important bonds involve the manipulation of power and devotion' LA Times