Lillian

The acclaimed Pultizer Prize-winning author of Music Against the Night, Yiyun Li, returns with four glimpses into one woman's life: four stories of remarkable introspection and resolve. A mourning mother, traveling alone, stays at a cottage in the English countryside where she finds herself unwillingly pulled into the orbit of the house's lonesome caretaker.A woman shouldering a recent loss goes to her doctor's office for a routine visit, where she meets an enigmatic new employee.The woman and her husband are parents without children. She is resigned to a listless rhythm of life - until it is interrupted by a famous scholar.A mother mourning her son is revisited by a memory of his classmate's curious precocity - and despair.First published in the New Yorker and united here for the first time, these four stories following Yiyun Li's character Lillian open up the beauty, mystery and devastation of life. Here, Li renders the insoluble, inexplicable human condition with a precision and grace unlike any other.