Wednesday's Child - Yiyun Li

Description

‘One of our major novelists’ Salman Rushdie‘One of our finest living authors’ New York Times

A dazzling new collection of short stories, spanning 15 years of writing, from Yiyun Li, the prize-winning author of The Book of Goose and Where Reasons End

A dazzling new collection of short stories written over a decade, spanning loss, alienation, aging 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.

Review

The stories may be described as short but each one is varied and rich in content and writing.

I found I had to take my time to read these stories. I couldn't finish one and start the next straightaway as there was so much depth to the writing that the story lingered with me. It made it impossible for me to concentrate on another story so soon afterwards.

Each story has a twist of sorts. Some unexpected and even comical. My favourite was about a lady in her late 80s who had only recently stopped ice skating. She had a live in carer and the two of them began to discover so much about each other.

The writing is quite extraordinary and unlike anything I have read before. Each story stands alone and is not connected by characters but at the same time there is a bond with each story.

I'm giving this book 4 out of 5 stars. My thanks to netgalley for the ARC to review.