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Must I Go cover art

Must I Go

Written by: Yiyun Li
Narrated by: Jane Alexander, Alex McKenna, John Rubinstein
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Publisher's Summary

"One of our major novelists" (Salman Rushdie) tells the story of a woman reflecting on her uncompromising life, and the life of a former lover, in this provocative novel.

“Yiyun Li 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)

Named One of the Best Books of the Year by Marie Claire and Esquire

Lilia Liska has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of 17 grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair. 

Increasingly obsessed with Roland's intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events, revealing the surprising, long-held secrets of her past. She returns inexorably to the memory of her daughter Lucy. This is a novel about life in all its messy glory, and of a life lived, by the extraordinary Lilia, absolutely on its own terms. With great candor and insight, Yiyun Li navigates the twin poles of grief and resilience, loss and rebirth, that compass a human heart.

©2020 Yiyun Li (P)2020 Random House Audio

What the critics say

"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)

What listeners say about Must I Go

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