Things in Nature Merely Grow

Written by Yiyun Li

Narrated by Suzanne Toren

Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James.

“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this audiobook.

“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”

There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: “doing the things that work,” including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.

This is an audiobook for James, but it is not an audiobook about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, “The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.” Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: May 20, 2025
• ISBN: 9781250424822

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.