Wednesday's Child

By: Yiyun Li

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Paperback | 14 March 2025

At a Glance

Paperback
256 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
19.8 x 13.0 x 1.5

Paperback

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Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024

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.

About the Author

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. Li’s 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.

Industry Reviews

'Any book by Yiyun Li is a cause for celebration' - SIGRID NUNEZ

'One of our finest living authors' - NEW YORK TIMES

'Bruising, beautiful' - GUARDIAN

'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

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