Where Reasons End cover art

Where Reasons End

Preview
Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection.
Listen to your selected audiobooks as long as you're a member.
Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Where Reasons End

By: Yiyun Li
Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
Try Standard free

Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $16.99

Buy Now for $16.99

About this listen

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li.

'Days: the easiest possession. The days he had refused would come, one at a time. They would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into a friend or an enemy to myself.'


A woman's teenage son takes his own life. It is incomprehensible. The woman is a writer, and so she attempts to comprehend her grief in the space she knows best: on the page, as an imagined conversation with the child she has lost. He is as sharp and funny and serious in death as he was in life, and he will speak back to her, unable to offer explanation or solace, but not yet, not quite, gone.

Taking the form of a dialogue between mother and son, Where Reasons End is an extraordinary portrait of parenthood, in all its painful contradictions of joy, humour and sorrow, and of what it is to lose a child.

Biographical Fiction Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Women's Fiction Biography

Critic Reviews

an incredible piece of work
a disquieting, delicate, affecting book
One of the most moving books I've ever read.
Profoundly moving. An astonishing book, a true work of art.
The writing is raw and deeply affecting.
Heart-rending
Li writes with a shimmering and deeply felt precision.
Unsentimental, brave and beautiful. An absolutely monumental book.
The most intelligent, insightful, heart-wrenching book of our time. (Andrew Sean Greer)
A masterpiece. This book haunts me more than any other novel I've read in recent years. (Garth Greenwell)
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.