Where Reasons End
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  • Published: 7 March 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241985199
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144

Where Reasons End

Formats & editions
Paperback
15 Apr 2020
EBook
7 Mar 2019
Audiobook
7 Feb 2019
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A devastating and utterly original portrait of motherhood and grief

'Days: the easiest possession. The days he had refused would come, one at a time. They would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into an ally or an enemy to myself.'

A woman's teenage son takes his own life. It is incomprehensible. The woman is a writer, and so she attempts to comprehend her grief in the space she knows best: on the page, as an imagined conversation with the child she has lost. He is as sharp and funny and serious in death as he was in life, and he will speak back to her, unable to offer explanation or solace, but not yet, not quite, gone.

Taking the form of a dialogue between mother and son, Where Reasons End is an extraordinary portrait of parenthood, in all its painful contradictions of joy, humour and sorrow, and of what it is to lose a child.
  • Published: 7 March 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241985199
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144
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Praise for Where Reasons End

an incredible piece of work

Chris Power, Open Book

a disquieting, delicate, affecting book

Irish Times

One of the most moving books I've ever read.

Leslie Jamison

Profoundly moving. An astonishing book, a true work of art.

Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers

The writing is raw and deeply affecting.

The Times

Heart-rending

The Sunday Times

Li writes with a shimmering and deeply felt precision.

Guardian

Unsentimental, brave and beautiful. An absolutely monumental book.

Daily Mail

The most intelligent, insightful, heart-wrenching book of our time.

Andrew Sean Greer

A masterpiece. This book haunts me more than any other novel I've read in recent years.

Garth Greenwell

A highly unusual novel in which a writer confronts one of life's deepest sorrows in losing her child. . . Funny, touching and profoundly moving

Chigozie Obioma