Where Reasons End

This short, intensely moving novel—an imagined dialogue between a mother and her teenage son after his suicide, written after Li lost her son in the same way—reads as though Li has invented, out of dire necessity, a form to hold the words she needs to say. But the echoes of other grief stories are there as well: like Joan Didion in A Year of Magical Thinking, Li's mother exists in a time of suspended reality; like the husband in Max Porter's Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, she comes at her sorrow sideways, shifting between banter and despair; like the mourning president in George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo, she holds tight to a unearthly connection with the dead that could be lost at any time.