"A portrait of resilience like no other, Must I Go takes Yiyun Li - and the reader - into entirely new emotional territory. Bracing and almost unnervingly perceptive, this is wisdom literature for our time." (Gish Jen, author of The Girl at the Baggage Claim)

"This brilliant novel examines lives lived, losses accumulated, and the slipperiness of perception. Yiyun Li writes deeply, drolly, and with elegance about history, even as it’s happening. She is one of my favorite writers, and Must I Go is an extraordinary book." (Meg Wolitzer, New York Times best-selling author of The Female Persuasion and The Interestings)

"Fierce and intransigent, startling in the frankness with which she rebuffs conventional expectations of maternal docility and ‘niceness,’ the protagonist of Yiyun Li’s fascinating new novel is both an 81-year-old grandmother mourning, after 37 years, the death by suicide of her firstborn child and a woman obsessed with the private life of a former lover, the father of the deceased daughter, whose diary she is reading and annotating at length. Lilia Liska is a memorable creation - ‘as hard as the hardest life’ - whose sharp judgments and shrewd, if harsh, insights into life ring with the painful candor of truth. As Lilia bravely declares: ‘Happy people have no use for words.'" (Joyce Carol Oates, best-selling author of We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde)