Things in Nature Merely Grow
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- $9.900
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- $9.900
Descripción editorial
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2025
‘The best book I have read this year’ DAVID NICHOLLS
‘Beautiful’ DOUGLAS STUART
‘Extraordinary’ SARAH MOSS
‘A formidable testament to a mother’s love’ SARA COLLINS
‘There is no good way to say this,’ Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.
‘There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.’
There is no good way to say this – because words fall short. In this remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance, Li turns to thinking and searching for words that might hold a place for her son, James. Li does ‘the things that work’: including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.
Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction 2026
Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Awards 2025
Finalist for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction 2025
‘To state that this courageous book is a testament to love is an understatement. One is left altered by it’ Observer
‘Unlike any other book I've read … an unforgettable monument to endurance’ Sunday Times
‘A book that has not a single spare word in it … I loved it so much’ Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake
‘A meditation on living and radical acceptance’ Guardian
‘A memoir unlike others, strange and profound and fiercely determined not to look away’ New York Times
‘One of the most astounding memoirs I have ever read’ Pandora Sykes, author of How Do We Know We're Doing It Right?
‘I will return to it for the rest of my life’ Charlotte Wood, author of Stone Yard Devotional
‘A manifesto of living, not dying’ Sinéad Gleeson, The Week
About the author
Yiyun Li is the author of twelve books of fiction and non-fiction. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Guardian First Book Award, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, an International Writer Award from the Royal Society of Literature, a MacArthur Fellowship and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Things in Nature Merely Grow is the winner of the 2026 Carnegie Medal for Non-Fiction, and was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. Li is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intimate memoir, novelist Li (Wednesday's Child) remembers her teenage sons, James and Vincent, after their deaths by suicide. Though she centers the account around James, who died more recently, Li recounts both boys' lives with palpable love and paints complex, distinct portraits of each. Li writes of marking her time after James's death with piano lessons, swimming, and gardening, and gradually coming to realize that death altered neither the facts about her sons nor her relationship to them. "In this abyss that I call my life, facts, with their logic, meaning, and weight, are what I hold on to," she explains. "It's not much, this holding on, and yet it's the best I can do." She also details childhood abuse at the hands of her mother and her own battle with depression, which she recalls with wrenching immediacy. Throughout, Li draws on references to grief in literature, including Shakespeare's Richard II and Euripides, though she ultimately refuses to call what she's going through "grieving" because it "seems to indicate a process that has an end point." Readers who've dealt with their own tragedies will find comfort and understanding here.
