Things in Nature Merely Grow
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2025
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NON-FICTION 2025
'Unforgettable' SUNDAY TIMES
'Courageous' OBSERVER
'One of the most important books to be published in years' SARA COLLINS
'There are few writers with Li’s power' DOUGLAS STUART
The best book I have read this year’ DAVID NICHOLLS
A remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance from acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist Yiyun Li as she considers the loss of her son James.
'There is no good way to say this,' Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.
'There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.'
There is no good way to say this – because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, 'a single point in a timeline'. Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.
This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving. As Li writes, 'The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.' Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.
As seen in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, LA Times, TIME, and the Paris Review.
'To state that this courageous book is a testament to love is an understatement. One is left altered by it' OBSERVER
'A story of loss that is unlike any other book I've read … an unforgettable monument to endurance' SUNDAY TIMES
'Resolutely unsentimental, and yet it might wind you with its emotional force' GUARDIAN
'A memoir unlike others, strange and profound and fiercely determined not to look away' NEW YORK TIMES
'An extraordinary book’ SARAH MOSS
'I will return to it for the rest of my life' CHARLOTTE WOOD
'A manifesto of living, not dying, and of how we endure the most unimaginable things' SINÉAD GLEESON, in THE WEEK
'A profound look at how a parent continues to live in a world without her children’ TIME
‘A book unlike any I've read, that brims with rare clarity and intelligence, with love and care. It will stay with me for a long time’ CECILE PIN
Yiyun Li is the author of eight works of fiction and two memoirs. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Guardian First Book Award, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, an International Writer Award from the Royal Society of Literature, a MacArthur Fellowship and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Things In Nature Merely Grow was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2025 and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.