WHERE REASONS END

YIYUN LI

Hamish Hamilton, 192pp, £12.99

Yiyun Li is a prize-winning Chinese American novelist, short-story writer and memoirist who has likened her decision to leave behind her native language and write only in English to a sort of death of the self. Where

Reasons End is a novel written in the wake of losing her teenage son to suicide and charts the attempts of a grieving mother – an unnamed writer – to remain in touch with Nikolai, her dead son. The voice of the boy, droll, pedantic, affectionately refusenik, is startlingly clear – he comes across as a perfectionist and, it is hinted, bi-polar, and as obsessed by language as his mother, with whom he argues about words as he reads her thoughts and speaks his responses.

Lara Feigel in the Guardian described the book as ‘a bit like autofiction, insistent on its integrity’. Li is ‘no longer creating characters, but giving us their voices in a kind of sustained present, never concealing the fact that we are reading words typed on a page. And her sustained investigation of the relationship between thought and feeling has become the central drama.’

Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times noted that ‘There’s no comforting belief in an afterlife. Unsparing awareness of loss continuingly wells up.’ But in the Spectator Claire Kohda Hazelton argued that the way Nikolai’s character seems to write itself ‘provides a reprieve from the silence left behind in the absence of the protagonist’s (and/or Li’s) son’. All critics were agreed in finding the book remarkable.