Must I Go: A Novel

Written by Yiyun Li

Narrated by Jane Alexander, Alex McKenna and John Rubinstein

“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.

“Yiyun Li is one of my favorite writers, and Must I Go is an extraordinary book.”—Meg Wolitzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion and The Interestings

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MARIE CLAIRE AND ESQUIRE

Lilia Liska 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 with Roland's intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events, revealing the surprising, long-held secrets of her past. She returns inexorably to the memory of her daughter Lucy. This is a novel about life in all its messy glory, and of a life lived, by 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9780593286517

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li is the author of twelve books of fiction and non-fiction. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Guardian First Book Award, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, an International Writer Award from the Royal Society of Literature, a MacArthur Fellowship and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Things in Nature Merely Grow is the winner of the 2026 Carnegie Medal for Non-Fiction, and was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. Li is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Lilia is an octogenarian in a rest home reflecting on her life through engaging with the published diaries of a minor writer, Roland Bouley, who, unbeknownst to him, fathered her first child when she was just sixteen. Lilia is strong-willed and capable. And, knowing that Roland was unlikely to return, she managed to gather another willing candidate in less than a week to take on the job of becoming her husband and the father of her unborn child. Gilbert and Lilia go on to have five more children together but it is that first child, Lucy, the product of Lilia’s liaison with Roland, who is the focus of her attention. This, in large part because Lucy killed herself as a young mother leaving behind an infant girl of her own whom Lilia and Gilbert go on to raise as their own child. Now, all these years later, Lilia seems to be looking for something in Roland’s diaries that connects to the daughter he never knew he had, something that might possibly explain what Lilia herself failed to see in Lucy.

There are numerous strong women in this novel — Lilia, Sidelle, Hetty, and, possibly also Lucy. Any one of them would have made a captivating focus for a novel. Unfortunately Yiyun Li has us spend most of our time with Roland, a feckless young man who, despite grandiose claims of novelistic ambition, never accomplishes much of anything. Moreover, although he has a wealth of experiences from across America, Asia, and Europe, he never seems to develop or mature. He is as weak and self-interested at the end of his long life as he was back in 1946 when he met Lilia. He makes for a tiresome companion over nearly 350 pages.

Death stalks this novel. Quite apart from Lucy’s suicide, there are numerous others, as well as accidental and untimely deaths aplenty, not to mention the fallout of two world wars. But it is Yiyun Li’s personal history — her own suicide attempts and her son’s successful suicide — that lurk behind my reading of the novel. It was very hard to get past those and treat the suicides in the novel as no more than that, novelistic flotsam. It’s possible that without this background knowledge this novel might have come across very differently to me. But would any reading bring these characters fully to life? Somehow I don’t think so.

Once again I’ve been impressed by Yiyun Li’s care and craft yet I find the result just as disappointing (I won’t say disheartening) as previous efforts. Still, I hold out hope for her next project, whatever that might be.

Not recommended.