A remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance from acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist Yiyun Li as she considers the loss of her son James.
1st September 2025
Hardcover
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Summary
A remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance from acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist Yiyun Li as she considers the loss of her son James.
Description
A remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance from acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist Yiyun Li as she considers the loss of her son James.
'There is no good way to say this,' Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.
'There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.'
There is no good way to say this – because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, 'a single point in a timeline'. Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.
This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, 'The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.' Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.
Critic Reviews
Praise for Yiyun Li:
'One of our finest living authors' New York Times
'Li writes with a shimmering and deeply felt precision' Guardian
‘Few writers tackle the way grief reverberates through our lives with Li’s frankness, tact, and humour’ Vulture
'Any book by Yiyun Li is a cause for celebration' Sigrid Nunez
'One of the great writers of our time' Tash Aw
About the Author
Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction – Wednesday’s Child; The Book of Goose; Must I Go; Where Reasons End; Kinder Than Solitude; Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; The Vagrants; and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers – and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Guardian First Book Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, a PEN/Malamud Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
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1st September 2025
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