Yiyun Li

Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Ag̈ns, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raisedthe place that Fabienne helped Ag̈ns escape ten years ago. Now, Ag̈ns is free to tell her story. As children in a war-ravaged, backwater town, theyd built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselvesuntil Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Ag̈ns on an epic trajectory...

In the provincial town of Muddy Waters in China, a young woman named Gu Shan is sentenced to death for her loss of faith in Communism. She is twenty-eight years old and has already spent ten years in prison. The citizens stage a protest after her death and, over the following six weeks, the town goes through uncertainty, hope, and fear until eventually the rebellion is brutally suppressed. Sumei, a mother of a young child, is sentenced to death as...

"A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she's lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In the stories of Wednesday's Child, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces--death, violence, estrangement--come...