Where Reasons End

Yiyun Li Hamish Hamilton €12.65 A writer whose teenage son has taken his life tries to cope with her grief by having a series of imagined conversations with him. If she cannot bring her darling boy back, at least she can find solace in this virtual relationship. It is a clever idea for a novel, and in other hands could have been genuinely poignant. Alas, Yiyun Li never quite manages to breathe life into her little literary conceit. There is a surfeit of arch aphorisms (‘One never makes up things in fiction’) and a lot of the dialogue feels contrived. Max Davidson