In store now! Must I Go by Yiyun Li
Following on from her rousing, honest, and heartbreaking memoirs of motherhood and family tragedy, Li’s new novel deals with the legacy of untold secrets, and the power they have to shake our lives even decades later. Set in a residential home in California, it follows Lilia, a thrice-widowed octogenarian of Lithuanian ancestry, as she crafts a memoir intended to be read after her death by one of her grandchildren, Katherine. This memoir will change the course of Katherine’s life, introducing her to the mother she barely knew, and the biological father she had no idea existed.
Tender, heartbreaking, and moving, Yiyun Li’s Must I Go asks, “How does the past shape the future? How do we live in the face of the unanswerable?” and subtly contrasts the painfully finite nature of human life, with the infinite complexity of our memories and emotions.
Order your copy today directly through October Books or buy online through our bookshop store and we’ll get a commission on your purchase.
Must I Go by Yiyun Li
Paperback £9.99
She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to a strange little book published by a vanity press: the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair. Increasingly obsessed by this fragment of intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events.
Gradually she undercuts Roland's charming but arrogant voice with an incisive and deeply moving commentary. She reveals to us the surprising, long-held secrets of her past. And she returns inexorably to her daughter, Lucy, who took her own life at the age of 27.
Must I Go is an unconventional epistolary novel, a gleefully one-way correspondence between the very-much-alive Lilia and the long-departed Roland. Though mortality is ever-present, this is ultimately a novel about life, in all its messy glory. Life lived, for the extraordinary Lilia, absolutely on its own terms.
With exquisite subtlety and insight, Yiyun Li navigates the twin poles of grief and resilience, loss and rebirth, that compass a human heart.
Order your copy today directly from October Books or buy online through our bookshop store and we’ll get commission on your purchase.
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