Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Vagrants | 2009 | Yiyun Li | Buy |
| 2 | Kinder Than Solitude | 2013 | Yiyun Li | Buy |
| 3 | Where Reasons End | 2019 | Yiyun Li | Buy |
| 4 | Must I Go | 2020 | Yiyun Li | Buy |
| 5 | The Book of Goose | 2022 | Yiyun Li | Buy |
Yiyun Li’s novels move between China and the West, examining how political history shapes private lives. The Vagrants (2009) is set in a provincial Chinese town during a public execution that forces the residents to take sides. Kinder Than Solitude (2013) follows three people — two in America, one in China — connected by a decades-old poisoning.
Where Reasons End (2019) is an imagined dialogue between a mother and her son who died by suicide. The Book of Goose (2022) follows two girls in postwar France whose collaborative fiction brings one of them literary fame and separates them forever.