Must I Go

"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--her first set in America.

Lilia Liska is eighty-one. She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of seventeen 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 by this fragment of intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events. She reveals to us the surprising, long-held secrets of her past. And she returns inexorably to the memory of her daughter, Lucy. This is a novel about life, in all its messy glory. Life lived, for 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.