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Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li
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Where Reasons End

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Narrator Cassandra Campbell

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Length 4 hours 4 minutes
Language English
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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)
Yiyun Li is the author of three novels, Where Reasons End, The Vagrants and Kinder Than Solitude, and two short-story collections, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, as well as the memoir, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She has won literary awards including the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was listed among Granta's 21 Best of Young American Novelists 2007. Her stories have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review and elsewhere. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of a Windham-Campbell Prize and a Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University.

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Reviews

The writing is raw and deeply affecting. Heart-rending Li writes with a shimmering and deeply felt precision. Unsentimental, brave and beautiful. An absolutely monumental book. The most intelligent, insightful, heart-wrenching book of our time. A masterpiece. This book haunts me more than any other novel I've read in recent years. A highly unusual novel in which a writer confronts one of life's deepest sorrows in losing her child. . . Funny, touching and profoundly moving an incredible piece of work a disquieting, delicate, affecting book One of the most moving books I've ever read. Profoundly moving. An astonishing book, a true work of art. Expand reviews
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