Where Reasons End

<b>A brilliant writer imagines a fictional conversation between a mother and the teenage son she lost to suicide. Yiyun Li confronts grief and transforms it into art, in a book of surprising beauty and love.</b><br /><br />The narrator writes, "<i>I had but one delusion, which I held onto with all my willpower: we once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I'm doing it over again, this time by words.</i>"<br /><br />Written in the months after the author lost a child to suicide and composed as a story cycle, this conversation between mother and child unfolds in a timeless world. Deeply intimate, poignant, and moving, these conversations portray the love and complexity in a relationship across generations, even as they capture the pain of sadness, longing, and loss.<br /><br />In writing this book, Yiyun Li was inspired by a line from Proust's<i>Remembrance of Things Past</i>"Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy."<br /><br />Meeting life's deepest sorrow with originality, precision and poise,<i>Where Reasons End</i>is suffused with intimacy, inescapable pain, and fierce love.