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Must I Go

By: Yiyun Li
Narrated by: Jane Alexander, Alex McKenna, John Rubinstein
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Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

Richly expansive and deeply moving, an intimate novel of secret lives and painful histories from one of the finest storytellers we have.

Lilia Liska is 81. She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children and seen the arrival of 17 grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to a strange little book published by a vanity press: 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. Gradually she undercuts Roland's charming but arrogant voice with an incisive and deeply moving commentary. She reveals to us the surprising, long-held secrets of her past. And she returns inexorably to her daughter, Lucy, who took her own life at the age of 27.

Must I Go is an unconventional epistolary novel, a gleefully one-way correspondence between the very-much-alive Lilia and the long-departed Roland. Though mortality is ever present, this is ultimately a novel about life, in all its messy glory. Life lived, for the extraordinary Lilia, absolutely on its own terms. With exquisite subtlety and insight, Yiyun Li navigates the twin poles of grief and resilience, loss and rebirth, that compass a human heart.

©2020 Yiyun Li (P)2020 Penguin Audio
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Critic reviews

"This brilliant novel examines lives lived, losses accumulated, and the slipperiness of perception. Yiyun Li writes deeply, drolly, and with elegance about history, even as it's happening. She is one of my favorite writers, and Must I Go is an extraordinary book." (Meg Wolitzer)

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Must I Go?

Well there's a question.

The answer for me was to do just that.

I went.

I listened to a number of unedifying chapters.

Ennui, and a studied disbelief in what I was hearing, settled around me like a haar. The haar didn't lift.

I gave up.

This novel didn't work for me.

I hope it'll work for you.


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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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Must I Go

I was drawn in because of the title, but I actually couldn’t finish the book. I got to chapter 18 and it was infuriatingly tedious. Tedious performance and tedious book. Tedious.

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