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Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

Format: Hardback

Condition: Very Good — £20.80
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In her first memoir, award-winning novelist Yiyun Li offers a journey of recovery through literature: a letter from a writer to like-minded readers.

"A meditation on the fact that literature itself lives and gives life."--Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead

"What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance?"

Startlingly original and shining with quiet wisdom, this is a luminous account of a life lived with books. Written over two years while the author battled suicidal depression, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living.

Yiyun Li grew up in China and has spent her adult life as an immigrant in a country not her own. She has been a scientist, an author, a mother, a daughter--and through it all she has been sustained by a profound connection with the writers and books she loves. From William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield to Søren Kierkegaard and Philip Larkin, Dear Friend is a journey through the deepest themes that bind these writers together.

Interweaving personal experiences with a wide-ranging homage to her most cherished literary influences, Yiyun Li confronts the two most essential questions of her identity: Why write? And why live?

Praise for Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

"Li has stared in the face of much that is beautiful and ugly and treacherous and illuminating--and from her experience she has produced a nourishing exploration of the will to live willfully."--The Washington Post

"Li's transformation into a writer . . . is nothing short of astonishing.'"--The New York Times Book Review

"An arrestingly lucid, intellectually vital series of contemplations on art, identity, and depression."--The Boston Globe

"Li is an exemplary storyteller and this account of her journey back to equilibrium, assisted by her closest companion, literature, is as powerful as any of her award-winning fiction, with the dark fixture of her Beijing past at its centre."--Financial Times

"Every writer is a reader first, and Dear Friend is Li's haunted, luminous love letter to the words that shaped her. . . . Her own prose is both lovely and opaque, fitfully illuminating a radiant landscape of the personal and profound."--Entertainment Weekly

"Yiyun Li's prose is lean and intense, and her ideas about books and writing are wholly original."--San Francisco Chronicle

Author: Yiyun Li (all their books in stock)
Format: Hardback
Published: 2017
Pages: 208
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0399589090

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Our conditions mean the following:

  • New - a brand new book
  • Almost New - appears new but is actually secondhand.
  • Very Good - only minor imperfections such as minor scuffs to edge or cover or a price written in pencil or shop sticker.
  • Standard Secondhand - Clearly been read before, but not too bad. We do not recommend these for gifting. Spines usually creased. Could also include creases or folds to cover, some writing such as in the cover or elsewhere, underlining or highlighting, but might not do. Possibly some stains or marks. Similar in general to books in any secondhand shop or charity shop.
  • Poor Condition - Usually this will have a specific problem such as writing inside, water damage, missing dust jacket, heavy staining, large creases or cuts. These are readable copies but not nice ones. On other websites this condition is called 'Acceptable' or 'Fair' , but we want to be more honest.
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