Yiyun Li Books in Order

These ten stories move between China and the United States, following people shaped by family duty, political history, migration, and private desire. Small encounters open onto larger questions about what people hide, remember, and owe one another.

This volume gathers Lu Xun’s complete fiction, including “Diary of a Madman,” “The Divorce,” and the title novella. Julia Lovell’s translations are accompanied by an introduction and an afterword by Yiyun Li.

In late-1970s Muddy River, political prisoner Gu Shan is condemned for rejecting the Communist Party. Her execution sends shock waves through the town, drawing families, officials, outcasts, and children into a brutal struggle over fear, loyalty, and survival.

In nine stories, men and women in contemporary China navigate solitude, marriage, grief, and unexpected attachments. Modest routines and well-meant plans reveal the longings and quiet damage beneath lives that appear ordinary.

This retelling for young readers follows Gilgamesh, the powerful but cruel king of Uruk, and Enkidu, the wild man sent to challenge him. Their friendship leads to adventure, loss, and Gilgamesh’s search for the secret of immortality.

Moran, Ruyu, and Boyang have spent two decades living with the consequences of a friend’s poisoning. Separated between China and the United States, they revisit a shared past where guilt, affection, and uncertainty have reshaped each life.

Auntie Mei is a postpartum nanny who prides herself on never becoming attached to the families she helps. Caring for a troubled new mother and her baby tests that rule, exposing the uneasy distance between professional care and love.

In this memoir, Li writes through a period of severe depression by returning to the books and writers she loves. Personal history, reading, and questions about how to keep living meet in a deeply reflective account.

After her teenage son Nikolai dies by suicide, a mother imagines their conversations continuing in a space beyond ordinary time. Their sharp, tender exchanges circle grief, memory, language, and the questions that cannot be answered.

At eighty-one, Lilia Liska begins annotating the diary of Roland Bouley, a man with whom she once had an affair. Her corrections become a funny, searching account of old love, family secrets, grief, and the right to tell one’s own story.

Gordon, a sixty-two-year-old man living in Oakland, becomes isolated after his dog frightens a neighbor. The conflict stirs memories of childhood abandonment and the complicated life he built with the woman who took him in.

Li guides readers through *War and Peace* in eighty-five daily installments, drawn from a shared online reading project. Part reading companion and part conversation, it makes room for questions, close attention, and the pleasures of taking Tolstoy slowly.

When Fabienne dies, Agnès finally tells the story of their childhood in postwar rural France. Their fierce friendship led to an audacious literary scheme, fame, separation, and a bond that neither girl could fully escape.

This collection follows people confronting loss, estrangement, aging, and the strains of everyday life. A grieving mother, a professor, a hairdresser, and others try to preserve ordinary routines as buried pain and uncertainty push to the surface.

After the death of her younger son, Li writes into the fact of a loss that follows the earlier death of his brother. This unflinching memoir considers motherhood, memory, language, and what writing can and cannot hold.

Set around the turn of the nineteenth century, this historical novel follows pianist John Field and Adelaide Percheron as music carries them across Europe. Their separate ambitions, loves, losses, and hard choices lead toward a shared future.