Things in Nature Merely Grow

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.