Haunting, elegiac and profound, Where Reasons End charts the process of parental grief through a mother’s imagined conversation with her dead son. With lyrical economy and deep compassion, Li crafts a tender, humane novel of love, loss and reflection.
From the critically acclaimed author of The Vagrants, a devastating and utterly original novel on grief and motherhood.
'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 an ally 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 itself, and he will speak back to her, unable to offer explanation or solace, but not yet, not quite, gone.
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.
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780241985182
Number of pages: 192
Weight: 140 g
Dimensions: 196 x 128 x 18 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
an incredible piece of work - Chris Power, Open Book
a disquieting, delicate, affecting book - Irish Times
One of the most moving books I've ever read. - Leslie Jamison
Profoundly moving. An astonishing book, a true work of art. - Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers
The writing is raw and deeply affecting. - The Times
Heart-rending - The Sunday Times
Li writes with a shimmering and deeply felt precision. - Guardian
Unsentimental, brave and beautiful. An absolutely monumental book. - Daily Mail
The most intelligent, insightful, heart-wrenching book of our time. - Andrew Sean Greer
A masterpiece. This book haunts me more than any other novel I've read in recent years. - Garth Greenwell
A highly unusual novel in which a writer confronts one of life's deepest sorrows in losing her child. . . Funny, touching and profoundly moving - Chigozie Obioma
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