Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024 'Any book by Yiyun Li is a cause for
celebration' SIGRID NUNEZ 'One of our finest living authors' NEW YORK TIMES 'Bruising
beautiful' GUARDIAN 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. '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
